External control of Analog Artist

I have been looking at the IPC functions to see if I can figure out a
way of making an external process (possibly started from within a
Cadence tool) initiate netlisting and start simulations without
blocking the Analog Artist session.
Is this possible?

So, from a menu in Analog Artist some process A is called (maybe in C
or Perl). The process A can at any point instruct Analog Artist to
netlist. Normal interaction with Analog Artist is also possible while
process A is running.

Any ideas?

Phil.

 

I have figured out the answer to my own question and thought I should
post it.

I wanted to be able to trigger netlisting and simulation by Analog
Artist from Emacs (I prefer to use text Spice files to setup stimuli
and simulations to GUIs - easier to review and quicker). My problem
was that it seems the interprocess communication functions in DFII
only allow for communication using stdin and stdout whereas to
communicate with emacs I would need to use TCP ports (I could be wrong
but I couldn't find a means of using stdin/stdout).

In the end a server written in Perl that started the emacs process and
forwarded messages from TCP ports to stdin provided a means of using C-
C C-s in emacs to launch a simulation!

I think Andrew Beckett did something similar with Tcl ...

 

TclX I think. This can also be done with a c-program. I think there
are examples in the documentation if you search for those IPC*
function names on sourcelink.