faustus@ic.Berkeley.EDU (Wayne A. Christopher) (01/28/88)
> Have anybody ported the University of Washington > VLSI design tools - Magic - to Mac II? Is there > someone out there planning to? Please let us know! I should point out that Magic isn't from the University of Washington, but rather from the University of California at Berkeley. Wayne
lawitzke@eecae.UUCP (John Lawitzke) (01/29/88)
in article <154@liutde.UUCP>, markus@liutde.UUCP (Markus Kaipainen) says: > Have anybody ported the University of Washington > VLSI design tools - Magic - to Mac II? Is there Magic is part of the UCB VLSI Tools and not the UW VLSI Tools. UW just provides a copy of the UCB Tools on their distribution tape. -- j UUCP: ...ihnp4!msudoc!eecae!lawitzke "And it's just a box of rain..." ARPA: lawitzke@eecae.ee.msu.edu (35.8.8.151)
buzz@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Mahboud Zabetian) (01/31/88)
in article <154@liutde.UUCP>, markus@liutde.UUCP (Markus Kaipainen) says: > Have anybody ported the University of Washington > VLSI design tools - Magic - to Mac II? Is there I use MAGIC on color Suns. I like it a lot, but I just wish that the mouse and menus weren't so illogical and would work like like a mac mouse. Two things I hate the most: In scroll bars, you never know how much you are going to scroll. If you want to scrollone page, you have to guess where to click. When you want to draw a rectangle, you click with one button aand then the other. Why can't we just drag??? I hope someone ports this to a Mac(how hard can it be on A/UX?), and I hope they use the Mac interface guidelines. -- Mahboud Zabetian buzz@phoenix.princeton.edu 183 Little Hall (609) 520-1271 Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544 (609) 734-7760 ****** Anyone need a soon-to-graduate hardware/software engineer? ********
cswarren@enzyme.berkeley.edu (Warren Gish;133 Biochem;x3-9219) (02/01/88)
In article <1601@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> buzz@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Mahboud Zabetian) writes: >in article <154@liutde.UUCP>, markus@liutde.UUCP (Markus Kaipainen) says: >> Have anybody ported the University of Washington >> VLSI design tools - Magic - to Mac II? Is there > > >I use MAGIC on color Suns. I like it a lot, but I just wish that the mouse and >menus weren't so illogical and would work like like a mac mouse. At MW Expo, Jeff Deutsch was hanging out at the SuperMac/Levco booth to plug his TransSPICE(TM) program which can utilize from 1 to 20 Levco Translink transputers in a MacII. The user interface is currently command-line, but Jeff says he's working on a Mac-style interface. The word from a friend at a large S. Valley chip co. who demoed TransSPICE recently is that the program can handle larger circuits than can the software they use on Intel 386-based machines. Without a transputer, TransSPICE was only negligably faster on the MacII than on a 386-based machine; with a single transputer, it was 6X faster (on the circuit(s) tested). This speed is apparently most important for Monte Carlo simulations where up to 20 simulations can be carried out simultaneously (100X faster than a MacII). The transputers are not cheap, though. And although Jeff did not mention price, his program may not be cheap either. For more info, contact Jeff Deutsch at (415) 856-9168. TransSPICE is a trademark of Deutsch Research.
alh@cblpn.ATT.COM (alh) (02/13/88)
I am interested in "xylene" ??? lsi technology. I don't know who offers
it or how to use it but I would like to get information on sources and
how well it has worked for others. Any information would be helpful.
Al Housel
Bell Labs
{ihnp4!cblpn!alh}howard@cpocd2.UUCP (Howard A. Landman) (02/18/88)
In article <1601@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> buzz@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Mahboud Zabetian) writes: >I just wish that the mouse and >menus weren't so illogical and would work like like a mac mouse. Don't confuse "unlike a Mac" with "illogical". They're not the same thing. >When you want to draw a rectangle, you click with one button aand then the >other. Why can't we just drag??? This is derived from Caesar, and makes perfect sense with a 3-button mouse. The advantage is that, if you have a rectangle that's slightly wrong, you can adjust it with a single click. If dragging is your only alternative, then you are forced to redraw (re-drag!) the entire rectangle, which is impossible if the rectangle is not all on screen. Further, suppose you are trying to draw a very large rectangle that must be precisely aligned. With dragging, you must zoom out to a large-scale view and hope your mousework is precise. With clicking, you can zoom in to each of two opposite corners and do precise placement very easily. So, fundamentally, the problem with dragging is that it assumes that you will never want to select a rectangle that is not entirely on-screen. Similar sorts of brain-damage can be seen in MacPaint, which won't let you erase or draw on any part of the page that isn't on-screen. So, if you've lassoed something, and you want to move it to a place where even a single pixel of it would be off-screen, you can't. You have to put it down (but what if you don't have anywhere to put it without destroying something?), move the window to a different part of the page (which must cover BOTH the place you put it AND the place you wanted to put it), re-lasso it (if you can), and then put it where you really wanted it. Blecch! (And HyperCard "solves" these problems by not letting a card be bigger than an original Mac screen!) Finally, recall that Caesar and Magic were originally developed on systems whose displays were serial devices hanging off an RS232 port. Imagine how slow and stupid dragging looks in such an environment, and the load it places on the I/O of your (time-shared) computer. Even on a single-user computer, with high bandwidth to the screen, the overhead of dragging would compete for CPU with Magic's background incremental DRC. >I hope someone ports this to a Mac(how hard can it be on A/UX?), and I hope >they use the Mac interface guidelines. The Mac interface, while well thought out, is not the ultimate interface. HyperCard doesn't conform to the Mac interface guidelines. Neither does original Smalltalk-80. There are tons of INITs and DAs which do nothing but patch problems (oversights) in the standard Mac interface, system, and finder. Modal dialogs are pure poison to multitasking. And all Mac users take for granted that any program can crash the entire machine, something that no UNIX user would tolerate for a second (but, UNIX takes longer to reboot :-). Of course, with only one mouse button, some severe changes will have to be made. Maybe shift-click and option-click and command-click can substitute ... -- Howard A. Landman {oliveb,hplabs}!intelca!mipos3!cpocd2!howard howard%cpocd2.intel.com@RELAY.CS.NET "I don't really see, why can't we go on as three?" - J. Airplane
frazier@oahu.cs.ucla.edu (Greg Frazier) (02/19/88)
In article <1121@cpocd2.UUCP> howard@cpocd2.UUCP (Howard A. Landman) writes: >In article <1601@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> buzz@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Mahboud Zabetian) writes: > >Don't confuse "unlike a Mac" with "illogical". They're not the same thing. > >>When you want to draw a rectangle, you click with one button aand then the >>other. Why can't we just drag??? > >This is derived from Caesar, and makes perfect sense with a 3-button mouse. >The advantage is that, if you have a rectangle that's slightly wrong, you can >adjust it with a single click. If dragging is your only alternative, then you >are forced to redraw (re-drag!) the entire rectangle, which is impossible if the >rectangle is not all on screen. Further, suppose you are trying to draw a very >large rectangle that must be precisely aligned. With dragging, you must zoom > Indeed, going to a one-button-and-drag interface would seriously reduce the effectiveness of the tool. The operation described above, where one is trying to precisely draw a large rectangle is used quite frequently in large designs (at least, by me). I often find myself defining large arrays of structures, and thus have three windows on my screen - one focused on the lower left hand corner, to make sure I start the rectangle in the right place, one in the upper right hand corner of the structure, to make sure I close the rectangle in the correct place, and a "global" window, so that I can see the results of my array construction. Because most of the time you want the structures to overlap, using an 'f' to put a square around the entire structure is not effective. Of course, I have personal prejudices against the single-button mice, too. It has always seemed to me that arguing that a mouse should have a single button was equivalent to saying that a keyboard should have half the keys - one can generate a 'c' by double-clicking the 'd'. It seems to me that any I/O device should have as many different inputs as can be easily managed - there are obvious problems with putting more than three buttons on a mouse, but I see no point in having less. Anyway, that's just my personal opinion, and really has nothing to do with the argument above except that I needed enough text here so that rn would not reject this posting. ..................................................................... Greg Frazier o CS dept., UCLA /\ ----^/----
d85-per@nada.kth.se (Per Hammarlund) (06/23/88)
Some time ago I asked the net for VLSI design software. These are the
3 toolsets I have been recommended and have been able to gather
information about:
**************************************************
The 1986 berkeley vlsi design tools.
This distribution is ONLY for organizations inside America and it is
not in the public domain.
There is a $175 materials and handling fee if your organization is a
member of the Industrial Liaison Program, a Government Agency or a
University, otherwise you are asked to make a $1,500 donation.
For more information get in contact with:
Cindy Manly
Industrial Liaison Office
479 Cory Hall
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720
(415) 643-6687
cindy%janus@berkeley.edu
cindy@janus.berkeley.edu
...!ucbvax!janus!cindy
**************************************************
A toolset from the University of Washington, includes all kinds of
good stuff! And it may be distributed outside America!
I have been advised that there is a new release in the works, out
sometime this summer - it is not decided whether this release will be
available to foreign institutions.
For more information read the following and for even more contact
Vicky Palm!
CMOS Toolset Available
The Northwest Lab for Integrated Systems (formerly UW/NW VLSI
Consortium) announces another release of VLSI design software.
Release 3.1 contains tools written at the University of Washington as
well as UC-Berkeley, CMU and MIT. MOSIS CMOS as well as nMOS
processes are fully supported. This release is available for a
nominal handling fee ($75) to universities and government contractors.
Included in this release are:
- The entire 1986 UCB distribution (Magic, Espresso, Crystal, Esim,
and many others).
- Magic drivers for a variety of devices including SUN 3, VAX station
GPX, and Apollo workstations (color, 8 planes minimum).
- Some of the older UCB tools such as Caesar, Lyra and Mextra.
- The switch level timing simulator RNL, originally developed by Chris
Terman of MIT.
- CFL, a library of procedures for assembly of layout cells into modules.
- Layout generators for a variety of modules including multipliers, FIFOs,
ROMs, PLAs, register files, counters, decoders and MUXes.
- A padframe generator capable of producing a MOSIS-compatible standard
frame instantiated with CMOS pads.
All inquiries should be addressed to:
Vicky Palm
Northwest Laboratory for Integrated Systems
Department of Computer Science, FR-35
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195
(206) 545-3796
palm@cs.washington.edu
**************************************************
The Electric package.
These are Steven Rubin's, the package's author, own words:
Electric is a complete package that includes a graphical editor and
many tools (design rule checkers, PLA generators, simulators [including
interface to SPICE], compactors, network consistency checkers, and even
a VHDL compiler for placing and routing standard cell libraries).
The system also handles many environments of design including nMOS
(currently two different design-rule sets), CMOS (currently six different
design-rule sets including one for MOSIS), Bipolar, Schematics, etc.
Electric is described in my recent textbook, "Computer Aids for VLSI
Design", Addison-Wesley, 1987 (yes, Steven M. Rubin, author).
Best of all, Electric is available to any orginazation that is willing
to sign a noncommercial/nondisclosure license agreement and pay a
tape fee of $200. There are over 100 groups throughout the world that
already have the system. If you want Electric, call or write:
Steven Rubin
Schlumberger Palo Alto Research
3340 Hillview Avenue
Palo Alto, California 94304
(415) 496-4624
rubin@spar
**************************************************
That's it. If you are interested in any of the packages, I recommend
that you get in contact with the contact persons listed.
Good luck!
I would like to thank Vicky Palm, Cindy Manly and Steven Rubin for
their help as well as all the people that came with the
recommendations.
/Per Hammarlund