On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 4:27 PM, Aveek Sen <aveeksen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi!, > > I am a first year student of Electronics & Communication Engineering > at NIT Agartala, India. I am the Fedora ambassador of that region. > > I want to know what I need to learn so that I am competent enough to > make some additions to the FEL, in the form of something related to > electronics. Hello Aveek, I'm looking for a command-wise compatibility of Alliance with Design Compiler. Alliance is used for Digital design and Design Compiler is an industry EDA tool. If "herb" developers make some progress in the future, I will replace alliance by herb. Herb is a fork of alliance. The problem with Alliance/herb is that it demands a hard learning curve. Thereby many people get fed up with alliance. At the same time, a lot of the manual tasks(things which should be automated) are required by the designer. A simple example, to report the timing of any path, it takes a lot of effort to first find the path. Hence as a designer point of view, I'm spending 80% of the design time on the software rather on the design itself. This is very bad. Graham Petley has some _basic_ bash scripts to find the critical path, fanin, fanouts etc which are provided with pharosc. (yum install pharosc*) If you would like, I would propose that you read those simple bash scripts and rewrite them cleanly under tcl. Tcl is widely use in the digital design and very easy to learn. With Tcl you can create some commands similar to that of design compiler so that universities around the world would find alliance/herb attractive. You will learn (during this project) how to calculate fanin, fanout, critical paths and gain in-depth knowledge about VHDL. This will be in the beginning. Afterwards, you are always welcome to improve it. Herb developers are working on cleaning alliance and improving the GUI. But I feel (Mukund correct me if I am wrong) nothing is being done on the synthesis stage or STA stage. I would certainly love to see some Liberty files and SDC support as well. These are opensource formats and the opensource community is not using it. A pity. Aveek, I will guide you in the process and at the same time, this project will be very valuable to both FEL and me :) regards, Chitlesh _______________________________________________ Fedora-electronic-lab-list mailing list Fedora-electronic-lab-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-electronic-lab-list
