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Gentlemen:
I've spent a few months trying to get
my hands around undestanding the design flow sufficient to understand how to get
an IC designed. Let me tell you where I am and then where my missing piece seems
to be. I can take Verilog files with Icarus and compile to the fpga target and I
get an a.out that makes sense in that it defines INV, AND, OR, DFF and others. I
can also take Magic, load a padframe into it and put cells such as INV, AND, OR,
DFF and others and that makes sense mostly. I can see how IRSIM & Spice fit
into the equation as I can see the .sim and .spice files that ext2sim and
ext2spice create and they seem to make sense. I can even run IRSIM and see an
inverter or a gate toggle as extracted from a Magic layout. I can also see that
Magic appears to have some routing capability with iroute & garouter, but
although I havent figured out how to run these functions yet, I can at least
imagine that I should be able to get them to do something.
The missing piece seems to be the
netlist in the middle. Somehow, there needs to be a way to take the netlist
expressed from Icarus with its associated INV, AND, OR, DFF SYM's and produce a
netlist that is an input to Magic that allows Magic to then load cells from its
library (yes, I have found a couple of libraries, one at mosis.org and the other
at University of Kansas). Admittedly, I may have to change either the netlist or
the cells to make the label names match, but I can see how that could be
accomplished. After that, it is necessary to load all those cells into the
middle of a blank piece of silicon and allow iroute, garouter or something
similar to then route the interconnections between the cells as described in the
netlist.
I did take a side trip with Electric a
month or so ago, and although I can compile its automotive speed controller IC
sample from source with its library and its silicon compiler and it even does
load in cells from its version of the mosis library, place them in rows and
connect them up, it is VHDL and I am working in Verilog. So, that and the fact
that Magic appears to be more prevalent then Electric has caused me to come back
to Magic again. I have trouble believing that Electric can do something that
Magic cannot do, rather, I suspect that my understanding of Magic is not
complete enough yet.
I am hoping that someone will help me
understand how this missing piece might work and shed some helpful comments on
my path towards enlightenment (IC speaking).
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