watt@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Gill Watt) (04/23/91)
howdy, Thanks to everyone who helped me find the Actel log file in \actuser\<user name>. It was exactly what I was looking for. I still haven't found a reference to it in the documentation but I'm still looking. I now have another difficulty with the Actel/WorkView design system that some of you folks in netland may have previously solved or at least worked around. We are using the WorkView ViewDraw package on SparcStations to program Actel FPGA parts using their macros libraries. This is working out well. The problem is that the Actel macro libraries use many generic part names for their own components. When designing the Actel part alone this is not a problem because we simply edit the viewdraw.ini directory list to put the Actel libraries before the standard builtin libraries. The difficulties occur when we try to simulate the Actel part within the larger design. If the Actel library is before the builtin library then the schematics for other parts end up containing Actel macros. For example, a 74f00 has a schematic with a part that is named NAND2 (meant to refer to a builtin part). Actel also has a macro that is named NAND2. Therefore, with the directories defined as they are, the entire design winds up defined in Actel parts. This is bad. We are considering working around this problem by renaming the Actel macros to something unique but it is a definite kludge. This would work for the simulation phase but, because the Actel place and route software looks for particular names for the macros when it validates the design, we would have to kludge some sort of translation program (using "lex" et.al.) to convert all of the names back to their original designations. It would be very helpful if it were possible to specify path names when adding components in the WorkView schematic. This would allow us to explicitly use the symbol that we desired rather than just the first one in the directory list that matches the name. Can this be done? Any other ideas?? Thanks in advance. -Gill -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Gill Watt (watt@eleazar.dartmouth.edu) Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755 ---------------------------------------------------------------------