Re: gEDA-user: PCB suggestion

[Daniel J Wisehart <dw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thursday 06 January 2005 16:59, Al Davis wrote:
> > Has anybody looked to see if IEEE or any other organization
> > has any official standards? It would seem to me that adopting
> > standards from an official organization would be the way to
> > go. Kind of like Linux and POSIX.
>
> There are too many standards for special applications.  We need
> one that can be used by different types of tools.  VHDL and
> Verilog are official standards.  With the AMS extensions (also
> official standards) they provide much of what is needed for
> simulation and synthesis, both analog and digital.
>
> That's why I proposed building on VHDL.  If we do this, and it
> works, industry will notice in a good way.  They might even
> help us.  There might be help available from both EDA vendors
> and EDA users.  We can solve a problem that has been plaguing
> them for many years.  The gschem and PCB formats are not
> elegant enough to be considered as standards.
>
> If somebody has a better idea, or knows of a better
> comprehensive standard, please tell me.

I know that going to a VHDL like structure would be convenient for one of the 
tools, but all of the other tools would have to change.  And does it really 
make sense to have Verilog inside of a VHDL block?

Why not use a neutral standard like XML?  That would allow easier backward 
compatibility because the order of the arguments is unimportant and it would 
support any new tools or new features going forward that no one has thought 
of yet.  Like your example, it could be filtered with a one-line awk script.

Regards,
Daniel