Monday, August 06, 2007

A loss: there is no OpenSource LVS netlist comparison tool

Since a while I've been pushing some well known electronic tools, mostly for simulation and VLSI. And to my knowledge, Fedora is the only major distribution shipping some of those tools (magic, ngspice, alliance(soon).. to name a few). But one thing that I really need to complete my design flow with the opensource tools is a LVS netlist comparison tool.

With this tool, one can verify their netlists from a particular schematic editor (gschem or xcircuit) with their netlists from a layout editor such as magic.

There is netgen and it is open source. But however it crashes during its main functionality and serves no more use than wasting time.

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Netgen is a tool for comparing netlists, a process known as LVS, which stands for "Layout vs. Schematic". This is an important step in the integrated circuit design flow, ensuring that the geometry that has been laid out matches the expected circuit.

The greatest need for LVS is in large analog or mixed-signal circuits that cannot be simulated in reasonable time. Even for small circuits, LVS can be done much faster than simulation, and provides feedback that makes it easier to find an error than does a simulation.

Since upstream didn't reply to me and there is no other reason to let the netgen package review open, I'm thereby closing it and asked for CVS cleanups.

If you happen to know an opensource LVS (Layout Versus Schematic) netlist checker, just let me know.

There is gemini, but one has to ask to the author and distribution is forbidden.

Till now, I'm using the couple "diff" and "kompare" to do LVS checks.

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