* New: In Cumulus, first versions of the ClockTree and Chip plugins.
Clock Tree plugin:
- It is strongly advised to use have 4 metal routing layers for the
tree to work. Otherwise, problems can arise with the detailed
routing (fully obstructed terminals).
- H-Tree can only be build (for now) for design with a form factor
between 0.5 an 2.
- The tree is created at the block top-level and only the leafs are
trans-hierarchically created on the instances/models. The new
cell with a clock tree, along with all it's sub-models is created
with a "_clocked" suffix.
- Leaf cells are connected through a simple Minimum Steiner Tree.
- Shorts are avoided by a systematic shift of the wires according
to their kind. No wire must pre-exist. When used as a sub-module
of "chip" the wires cannot be moved. When created on a block,
the wires can be loaded in the detailed router as manual global
router.
Chip Plugin:
- Perform the pad placement and corona creation. Replacement at
last of the clunky code from Wu Yifei.
- Relies on a Python configuration file '<design>_chip.py' with
a "chip" dictionnary.
* New: In Cumulus, new Alliance.py module (*not* a plugin) providing
an encapsulation for Alliance command line tools. The other main
feature is that it provides a "Makefile like" behavior. Based on
the command dependencies a DAG is contructed, then a static
ordering of the commands. Commands are then executed to rebuild
outdated target.
The Alliance environment supplied to the commands is read from
the Coriolis configuration file <alliance.conf>.
For this first evaluation version, only <boom>, <boog> and
<loon> support are provided.
It still not clear how to encapsulate the Coriolis tools in
the same way.
* Change: In CRL Core, in helpers/__init__.py, change the way the static
initialization (module) is done. All the commands are put inside
a "staticInitialization()" function, which is then explicitly
called by others. This is a better solution agains *no* or *twice*
initialization. Modificate <coriolisInit.py> accordingly (as
<Alliance.py> from Cumulus.
Jean-Paul Chaput