gEDA-user: Hierarchy viewer and database proposal

[Bill Cox <bill@viasic.com>]

Hi.

I'm trying to use gschem to design the digital portions of a chip we're 
building.  The schematic editor looks pretty good.  Gschem has a fine 
GUI, and it's highly configurable.  However, support for doing complex 
stuff on a hierarchical designs could be improved.

I'd like to build a commercial quality netlist database into the gEDA 
system.  In particular, it would read the .sch and .sym files as 
gnetlist does, but it would build a traditional netlist database from 
it.  Guile commands would be added for traversing and manipulating the 
data in this database, although I'll write my netlisters in C.  The 
kinds of tools this would help enable include:

- DRC checking on the netlist, such as floating inputs, shorted outputs, 
or attribute errors
- Improved hierarchical netlisting
...

With such a database, a powerful hierarchy viewer mode could easily be 
added to gschem, although I'm not going to write it.  With such a mode, 
one could:

- Highlight and follow signals through the hierarchy in gschem.
- Build a tree-control for traversing the hierarchy
...

I've written a few such databases in the past while working for 
QuickLogic, Synplicity, and ViASIC.  I also wrote the original schematic 
generator in Synplify's Analyst product.  I'm going to write one for 
gschem for my own hierarchical netlisting and DRC checking purposes.

Would there be any interest in having this tool in the gEDA suite?

Bill Cox
billATviasic.com
(replace the AT with @)