Setting up the Design Kit Model Verification Tool

This chapter describes the operations necessary for setting up the ADS Design Kit Model Verification Tool.

Supported Simulators

There are several simulators currently supported by the ADS Design Kit Model Verification Tool. All simulators currently supported by the verification tool are listed in the following table.

Vendor	Simulator	Versions
Agilent Technologies	hpeesofsim	hpeesofsim 2003A and later
Synopsis, Inc.	Hspice	2004.03 and later
Cadence Design Systems Inc.	Spectre	Cadence DFII versions:

Additional simulators to those listed in this table may be supported in future revisions of the ADS Design Kit Model Verification Tool. For more information on supported simulators, consult your Agilent Technologies sales representative.

Using Perl

Practical Extraction Report Language ( Perl ) is a scripting language widely used for system administration and programming on the World Wide Web. The Design Kit Model Verification tool makes extensive use of Perl scripts in order to provide the flexibility to write and customize your own perl scripts. The Design Kit Model Verification tool is currently script driven only and has no user interface (UI). The thought behind making this tool script driven only was that even if a UI had been implemented, most users would quickly revert to using scripts to use the tool due to its ability to be called by other perl scripts.

Perl scripts are made up of a list of statements (terminated by semicolons) and declarations. The first line of a perl script uses the #! symbols followed by the full path name of the directory where the version of Perl resides (see Using Perl on UNIX). When Perl detects the comment character ( # ) within the program, it ignores the rest of the line. Many of the examples in this document use several comment characters to denote information about the lines of code following the comments. The comment character is a good tool for helping you to document your own perl scripts within the code.

Note On unix, the first 16 bits (2 bytes) of a file determine its file type. The #! placed as the first characters on the first line are the first 16 bits that indicate this file type is a shell script file where the script interpreter is given next. So, first having a blank line and then a line with #! does not work - in this case, #! is simply a comment.

On all systems, you run your Perl script by providing the script name as a parameter to the Perl interpreter. For example, if you had created a script called, myPerlScript.pl, you would enter the following command to execute the script:

perl myPerlScript.pl

Perl statements can be simple or compound statements, consisting of a variety of operators, modifiers, expressions, and functions. The ADS design kit model verification tool provides a predefined selection of functions that help you build your script. As you become more proficient in building your scripts, you will find that modification of existing scripts is a simple way to add to your design kit model verification tool set.
Note that within your perl scripts, it is required to use vertical quoted strings (' <string> ' or "<string>" ) wherever the chosen value happens to be a perl command, otherwise your script will not run correctly. Within the perl scripts, it is highly recommended that you quote all strings to reduce the possibility of generating errors.

Note In perl, single quotes (' <string> ') represent text as is, with no variable substitution. Double quotes ( "<string>" ) perform variable substitution. For example, "$myVar" will be substituted by its value if it is in double quotes, while '$myVar' will just be equal to $myVar if it is in single quotes.

Perl originated in the UNIX community and therefore has a strong UNIX slant; however, usage within the Windows community is growing rapidly. ActivePerl is a port of core Perl to Windows.

For detailed information on the Perl scripting language, refer to www.perl.com on the O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. network.

The Perl scripting language is interpreted by a program called, perl (note the small 'p'). Advanced Design System contains a perl executable (perl) that is located under:

$HPEESOF_DIR/tools/bin (on unix)

and

$HPEESOF_DIR/tools/perl/bin (on PC)

Using Perl on UNIX

Typically, the Perl program is run by either making it directly executable, or by passing the name of the source file as an argument in the command line. When possible, it is beneficial for both /usr/bin/perl and /usr/local/bin/perl to be symbolic links to the actual binary file. If this is not possible, system administrators are strongly encouraged to add symbolic links to perl and its accompanying utilities into a directory typically found along the user's PATH, or some other convenient location.

Note In the design kit model verification tool perl scripts, the ADS version of perl is used.

Using Perl on Windows

When using the ActiveState installer for Perl, a WinNT installation modifies the Registry to associate the .pl extension with the perl interpreter. If you install Perl by other means (including building from the sources), you may have to modify the Registry yourself. Note that this means that you can no longer tell the difference between an executable Perl program and a Perl library file. If you do not want to modify the registry, the perl <sourcefile> command from a shell window should run as on unix if the PATH variable is correctly defined.

If the invocation of the different simulators does not succeed as planned, try to use the cygnus bash shell on the PC (located in $HPEESOF_DIR/tools/bin) for running your perl scripts (see Configuring the Environment).

Note When running a perl command you may get the error, can't open perl script "/<path2file>": No such file or directory. This is because your current directory is not on the same drive as the perl file you want to access. To solve this you must run the command as perl <drive_letter> :/ <path2file>.

Configuring the Environment

Upon installation, the verification tool attempts to find all files in the directory tree pointed to by an environment variable called DKITVERIFICATION. All executable files are located in the $DKITVERIFICATION/bin directory. If you are using the standard installation, you can add dKitVrun before any verification tool command which will set-up the verification tool specific environment correctly so the command will run. For example:

dKitVrun dKitTemplateCreate.pl

The dKitVrun command is located in $HPEESOF_DIR/bin.

To avoid using dKitVrun, you can setup the environment variables yourself. When the verification tool is installed, the dkitverification install directory is $HPEESOF_DIR/design_kit/verification.

Note $HPEESOF_DIR is the location of the ADS installation (see Developing the Script Header).

To ease the use of the verification tool, add the declaration of this variable to the initialization scripts.

For UNIX:

Append the following to your
~/.profile if you are using the Korn shell:

export DKITVERIFICATION= <dkitverification install directory>

export PATH=$PATH:$DKITVERIFICATION/bin

or to your
~/.cshrc if you are using the C shell:

setenv DKITVERIFICATION <dkitverification install directory>

setenv PATH ${PATH}:$DKITVERIFICATION/bin

After adding the environment variables to the initialization file, either re-logon or source your initialization file using one of the following commands:

. ~/.profile for the Korn shell

Or

source ~/.cshrc for the C-shell

For the PC:

Set the system wide Environment variable

DKITVERIFICATION <dkitverification install directory>

and add

DKITVERIFICATION\bin

to the PATH using the Start > Settings > Control Panel, System tool.

On some PC operating systems, it might be necessary to directly run the perl scripts from within a Cygnus shell. To configure the shell:

1. Start a cygnus shell ($HPEESOF_DIR/tools/bin/bash.exe).
2. Issue the following commands to mount the necessary bin directories:
   mount $HPEESOF_DIR/tools/bin /bin
   mount $HPEESOF_DIR/tools/bin /usr/bin

Modifying the Source Code

If you have a need to modify the source code, you must copy the entire verification tree to another directory (e.g. $HPEESOF_DIR/custom/verification), and set the DKITVERIFICATION environment variable accordingly. If you copy the entire verification tree to another directory, you will not be able to use the dKitVrun utility as described in Configuring the Environment unless you edit it and change the paths accordingly.

Prior to Running a Script

Before attempting to develop a perl script and run the verification tool as described in Building a Basic Script or Building an Advanced Script, it is important to ensure that your environment has been configured properly and all of the default parameter and template modules have been created.

To quickly setup a new work directory for running the design kit model verification tool, create a new directory and from within that directory, issue the following command.

dKitSetupWork.pl

Also, verify that your PATH has been modified so that the hpeesofsim, spectre and hspice simulators can be found and the correct environment variables have been set for them to work. For more information on configuring your environment for these simulators, consult the appropriate simulator installation documentation.