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Modify OpenAccess to Handle Multilingual UTF-8 Strings Natively

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I once had a job scrutinizing Virtuoso schematics that contained many useful annotations written in Italian.  EDA tools generally support only ASCII strings, but the Italian designers were lucky–theirs is one of the few languages that can be written naturally using the same characters as English.

Wouldn’t it be nice to annotate designs in OpenAccess databases using any of the world’s languages?  You can do it right now, using any OpenAccess release.More

Control Your IC Design Flow

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Chip design is an iterative process.  The design flow is run repeatedly as it is extended and refined into a program that can automatically build the entire chip. Your flow needs software to make sure that only the necessary steps are executed, in the correct order, on the correct data. Different hierarchical blocks must be constructed similarly, yet differently.

This is one of a series of articles on simple, specific techniques that will make your chip design flow easy to use. In this installment, I will explain how to control your chip design flow, and rules to keep it organized.More

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Give Files in Your IC Design Flow Meaningful Names

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When a user wants chip design data, a script or a log file, how do they find it? They look at the file and directory names. In fact, this may be the only documentation available.

As an IC design flow architect, proper file naming is the most important thing you can do to guide your users to the data they need.  Further, you need to use safe names that can be used without transformation for any purpose, on any computing platform.More

Always Put Your Name on It

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Last week I got an e-mail from a manager.  “I saw your name on some source code.  Nice job.  Here is some information that might interest you.”  Sweet.  By just  typing my name, I got information I needed, plus I have someone thinking nice things about me.  If you do good work, put your name on it.  If you do not do good work, well, you can stop reading right now.
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Eclipse IDE with OpenAccess

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Eclipse works great for me as an C++ integrated development environment (IDE) for OpenAccess-based applications. It supports all the same platforms as OpenAccess, and it’s free software.

This article addresses C++ application development using Eclipse CDT.  I wrote another article on using Eclipse PyDev to develop OpenAccess Python applications.

Here’s how to get started. Your comments and corrections are always appreciated.

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My Favorite LinkedIn Hack

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In your career, you have probably worked very closely with certain companies, and you want to connect with your friends there. You could connect with them easily if you added that company to your profile, but since you were never actually an employee, that company really does not belong in your LinkedIn profile.

Ready for the hack? More

Creating a Single SDC File for Cadence SoC Encounter and PKS, Pre- and Post-CTS

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This is an old, old post, but over the years it continues to be one of my most popular pages. I leave it here in the hope that it is still useful. Please add your corrections or comment. –John

It is good design practice to use as few SDC files as possible. This post describes a way to create a single SDC file that can be used both before and after clock tree synthesis (CTS), and by both Cadence PKS and SoC Encounter.More