Re: gEDA-user: futurenet question

[Dan McMahill <dan@mcmahill.net>]

On Thu, Nov 20, 2003 at 09:28:30AM +1300, Arnim Littek wrote:
> On Thu, 19 Nov 2003, John Griessen wrote:
> > What might be interesting to us on this list,
> > is a look at a sample of a futurenet pinlist.  I've never heard of that tool.
> 
> Dash/Futurenet, from Data I/O in the late 80s/early 90s before
> it got canned.  I used it for front end sch. entry for ASIC work and
> later it was the sch. cap tool for Xilinx for a few editions of their
> tools, pre-NeoCAD.  Of all of the sch. cap tools I've ever used, it
> had the best combination of mouse/kybd work I've ever encountered, and
> I could use it as fast as pen and paper to put an idea down.
> 
> Was essentially a DOS app, highly optimised assembler all through it,
> but got orphaned along the way, for reasons only someone from DataIO
> could answer (prima donna programmer no longer available?), when they
> went to an inferior Windows-based interface (ECS as I recall).  One of
> my colleagues liked it so well he persisted, against the odds and with
> lots of bandaid glue scripts, in using it for Xilinx work until well
> into the late 90s.  Can probably come up with some netlist info from
> Michael, I'll rattle his cage.
> 
> FWIW,
> 
> Arnim
> 

That would be great.  My specific questions at this point are:

;; Known areas of uncertainty:
;;  - is the netlist case sensitive?
;;
;;  - any restrictions on netnames with regards to length and
;;    characters?  For example "unnamed_net4" is long, lowercase,
;;    and has an "_".  "+5V" starts with a "+".  Is this allowed?
;;
;;  - Where does the footprint go?  Neither pinlist I've seen had
;;    footprints.  
;;
;;  - How are DATA,3 and DATA,4 used?  In one example, DATA,4 is 
;;    not used.  In the other DATA,3 and DATA,4 are identical and
;;    appear to be set to the value (10.0k for example) of the part.
;;
;;  - In the "PIN" and "SIG" lines, what are the various fields really
;;    doing?
;;
;;    It seems that for a PIN line, its:
;;    PIN,,<netname>,1-1,5,<net attribute number>,<pinnumber>
;;       so what are the "1-1" and the "5"?  On the <net attribute
;;       number> I've seen "23", "25", and "100".  Maybe these
;;       indicate signal vs power or some sort of routing preference?
;;
;;    For a SIG line, the format seems to be
;;    SIG,<netname>,1-1,5,<netname>
;;
;;    But I've seen one example that had:
;;    SIG,GND,1-1,5,A
;;
;;    Despite this, what exactly are "1-1" and "5"?
;;

-Dan

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