Chipndale, son of Chipmonk, known as "Chipndale" to its friends, is an interactive graphic layout tool made to run in Cedar. The Cedar environment allows Chipndale to make use of multiple windows, extensive parallel processing, vast amounts of memory, pop-up menus, and other assorted goodies. When complete, Chipndale will have a DRC and circuit extractor, a fast set of IO and checkplot routines, and modular device extensibility. What's more, everything in Chipndale will be completely technology independent, that is, all the features will be equally at home dealing with PC boards or CMOS chips. Such is the dream.
The reality is the substance of this paper. For the nonce, we (the implementors) would like you (the users) to be exposed to the skeletal features of the system -- what a viewer looks like, how to move around in a design, the difference between a terminal monitor and a control panel and so on. We do not, however, expect or even want you to be using Chipndale for new designs; in fact, it is next to impossible to do so right now. The instructions included here will allow you to call up Chipndale, read in old Chipmonk files, scale and rotate the designs, and print them out on the Versatec. You will not be limited by the size or complexity of your designs, but for now they must be in NMOS to be understood. If you are really daring, you can open the file "ChipndaleNmos.tip" and try out some of the commands listed there; the interface has been intentially designed to resemble Chipmonk. But nothing is guaranteed save the commands presented here. The moral of the story is:
The ice you are skating on is currently under development; it is apt to be thin in places.
An example of a thin spot is the fact that as of the moment, text is not read in from old Chipmonk files. So if there are pieces of your file missing, this may be the reason. Don't get mad, get even; that is, if you are miffed at these and other shorcomings, send us mail. We won't know about it unless you tell us.
Saying Hello
Go find yourself a Dorado and login. Issue the following commands to the Exec:
% bringover /a /p [indigo]<chipndale>top>cddesign
Each command will take a few minutes to finish. Now the machine is equipped with all the information it needs to run the NMOS version of Chipndale with the Versatec plotting routine. If you cannot find a Dorado, don't know how to login, or generally have trouble with any of the commands, ask a nearby Dorado-user to help you out. They don't usually bite.
Becoming Acquainted
Start up this session of Chipndale with the incantation:
no more necessary, but, in future might get necessary again.
This command will call up the Chipndale Terminal monitor (hereafter referred to as "Terminal") in the lower right of the screen and will initialize the plotting module. Terminal keeps a log of all the commands issued concerning Chipndale; it is where you will look to find information about what Chipndale is trying to execute and how that execution is progressing.
To get a Chipmonk design to play with, type the command:
It is important to know what technology the design is. Terminal will respond with the request:
Input file >
Type in the name of your file at the prompt. The file may either be present locally or on one of the file servers; default is a ".chip" file. For example, you could read in a file as:
/ivy/monier/aspen
if it was already on the local disk. You need not type in the extension since the input routine assumes that you know what is required and will look for a chip file. If you lied about the name and the file cannot be located, the program will gracelessly crash and woe be unto you. In future, Chipndale will check first to see if the file is present; right now, you can tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs.
If all is going well, the file will be read in and a Chipndale viewer icon labeled with your filename will appear in the lower left of the screen. Middle click this icon to expand the viewer. You will also notice a control panel appear in the lower right of the screen. Functionally similar to the buttons available at the bottom of the Chipmonk screen, the description of the panel's use is reserved for a more comprehensive manual.
A temporary (but still unfortunate) aspect of the file conversion routine will become apparent at this point. Your design will not be centered on the screen; there is a better than even chance that it will not even be visible. In order to find the layout, you need to change scale. Hold down the V key and middle click. A pop-up menu will appear -- one of the choices is quickshrink. Select this option with the middle button (the menu will disappear). If your design is still invisible, do more quickshrinks until you see it. You can then use the grow and shrink options to bring it to a comfortable size (a quickgrow/quickshrink is equivalent to four grow/shrinkv commands). The initial scale problem will be taken care of in a later release; for now bear with us.
Making Friends
Moving Around in the Viewer
You already know how to change scale using the V-(middle click) pop-up menu. Once you have the range where you want it, it is time to move the viewer over the portion of the design you are interested in. To use the move command, while holding down the space bar, move the cursor with the middle button down. A line will be continuously traced from the starting cursor position to the current one. When you release the mouse button, the viewer will move in proportion to that vector.
Rotating the Design
In order to rotate the design 90#clockwise, select the entire layout with (Space Bar)-A. Now indicate a rotation with CTRL-R. The design will be rotated keeping the upper left corner fixed. As long as the design is selected, hitting more CTRL-R's will continue the rotation. You can remove the selection by holding down "C" and right-clicking the mouse.
This command is useful in conjunction with the plotting routine -- for now the Versatec only plots in one width so it is important to select an appropriate orientation for printing.
Printing on the Versatec
If you loaded and ran the vplot module according to the earlier instructions, the commands are all in place for you to print out checkplots. The Alto VICE associated with the Versatec should be in FTP receive mode (i.e. running Oliver).
Manipulate the design in the viewer so that you can see the entire amount of information you want to print. Hold down TAB-V, and with the left button down, draw a rectangle containing that part of the design that you want to come out on paper. When you release the button, Terminal will tell you that your design in being transferred to the Alto. A new viewer will appear, showing the middle of the horizontal stripe currently under consideration. An arrow pointing to the design will show you how far the transfer has progressed. After the transfer is complete, the connection to the Alto will be closed and the Trident file "plot.bits" will be printed on the Versatec. This routine should not break even on large and complex designs.
Using the Color Display
Chipndale also uses the color screen as a viewer. Type the command
&7 cdcolor
to enable the display.
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New commands
<space>-mark shows the selected Rect on an OTHER viewer
<space>-select shows the selected Rect on an this viewer
<space>-draw moves this viewer
< grows the design (see more detail on smaller part)
> shrinks the design (see more in less detail)
/ shows positions of other viewers