Drawing Circuit Diagrams - Update

Well, after a bit of wrangling with the EGB layout algorithm - things are working out!



There are still a few crossovers on the outputs of U8 & U9 which I haven't got to the bottom of yet...

Animation

To help get to the bottom of such things, I've implemented a bit of animation to show me how the layout is progressing at each step. Using python's generators to unroll the main layout loop was the key here. First, the circuit data structure is drawn, then after a small delay the .next() is called on the generator, and the circuit redrawn. This continues until the generator is spent. Pretty nifty if I do say so myself...

Improvements

At the minute, the layout algorithm is sweeping from the inputs of the circuit to the outputs. I'm worried that this won't be optimum for untangling all types of circuits. So, once I debug my EGB algorithm implementation, I'll experiment with the following to see what gives the best results:

• inputs to outputs


• outputs to inputs


• inputs to outputs to inputs

I'm also concerned about the initial state of the circuit data structures. Maybe I've giving the algorithm too easy of a time. The instantiations in the circuit data structure are more or less in the order that they are in the verilog file. Maybe I should mix-up the instantiation order in the verilog files. Or maybe have a switch to randomize the instantiation orders in the data structure...

I've also to trawl/profile the code and look for optimizations...

Next Steps

After playing around with the layout algorithm, I think I'll add a final stage to tidy up the drawing of the nets. Once I get something half-pretty going, I'll concentrate on parsing a bigger subset of the verilog language.