Scripting for EDA Tools: A Case Study

How to integrate EDA tools to enable interoperability and ease of use has been a very time-consuming and complicated job. Conventionally, each tool comes with a unique and simple set of commands for interactive use such as Sis[12], Vis[8], and Magic[5], but it lacks full programming capability of a scripting language. Also, it discourages further exploration to the underlying system functionality. Not only the code is hard to reuse, but also rapid prototyping of a new algorithm is impossible. A new algorithm may still take years to develop, which has to start from scratch and struggles between various formats. In this paper, we study and address how to easily integrate those application program interface(API)’s into most popular scripting languages such as Tcl[10] or Perl[13]. This enables a full scripting or programming language capability into a tool, and most important of all, any tool can be interoperated over a uniform platform on an API level. Rapid prototyping of a new algorithm thus becomes much easier and faster. It also promotes software reuse. Many existing extension packages for the scripting languages can be therefore integrated such as Tk[10] for graphic user interface(GUI), and CPAN collection[4] for various Perl applications. From a standpoint of high software quality, this approach also provides a very good vehicle for comprehensive testing of each API in an EDA tool.