Tim's directory of miscellaneous and mostly outdated programs

Tim's Law: A program grows as the exponent of its revision number.

OpenCircuitDesign

My ongoing project is a complete open-source VLSI design flow, both digital and analog. I have collected together some older tools such as Magic, IRSIM, and Netgen, updating and upgrading them, and a few tools of my own, including XCircuit and Qrouter. This body of work represents several complete design flows, including verilog to layout (digital standard cell flow), schematic capture with layout-vs.-schematic (LVS) checking, and custom layout.

All of these tools are kept in a git repository, and each has its own webpage with download and installation information, Wiki pages, and copious documentation.

Other CAD tool programs:

pplot is a plotting program for turning integrated circuit layouts in CIF format into neatly printed plots on your printer. My hacks to this program include EPS compatibility and color printer output. Version since 12/2/97 can be compiled under Linux. By the way, if you're interested in how just about *ANY* printer (including, for instance, the HP color deskjets) can be turned into an instant PostScript® printer, then look at the pplot README file, or ps2pcl.c below.
pplot.tar.gz
Note: Several bug fixes were made on 8/17/98; pplot will now print on high-resolution color laser printers. The output from a QMS MagiColor2-EX (2400 x 600 DPI) or Xerox/Tek Phaser 2135 (1200 x 1200 DPI) is especially nice, with the stipple patterns so dense that they look essentially opaque. A bugfix introduced on 8/16/01 prevents PostScript errors if a page device larger than 8.5 inches is specified.
Click here for a sample color output from pplot (originally PostScript®): pressure sensor (19.3KB GIF). Unfortunately, this plot doesn't really tell the whole story. The GIF is generated by ghostscript, which uses the standard monitor resolution of 72dpi, which interacts with device-dependent code in the program. Consequently, stipple patterns come out large and ungainly. At 300dpi, they look reasonably good, and at 600dpi, nearly opaque.
net.tar.gz is a netlist compiler program for analog and digital VLSI circuits. The original program was written by Chris Terman of MIT as part of the "rsim" simulator. Later, the "rsim" code was heavily modified by Mark Horowitz and others at Stanford to become the popular IRSIM switch simulator (see the web page on magic). Thanks to Jim Burr for information on the origin of net.
In summary, input for the program net is a circuit description in a format which is a subset of LISP (see net.doc). The output of "net" is a file in ".sim" format, although the format has been extended to include other device types such as bipolar transistors and capacitors.
News: This program has now been ported to Linux (April 2000).
Here is the source tree of net.
netgen-1.1.tgz. In order to netlist compare with extracted output from "magic", I use the program "netcomp", which is part of the "netgen" package of netlist-handling tools. As of December, 2002, this package has been redesigned with a new "make" process to match the rest of the open-source tool suite. This guarantees compilation under Linux (the development platform), although other operating systems may require some manual tweaking of compile-time options. Netgen has also been redesigned to (optionally) compile under Tcl, with a full-word command-line syntax, and the "netgen" and "netcmp" parts of the package have been combined. Go to the magic-7.2 page from the Magic VLSI home page for download and information. Netgen was written by Massimo Sivilotti (written when he was a student at Caltech, around 1990; now he's at Tanner Research). Version 1.1 has been hacked on by me. Details of where I expect to go with this can be found in the netgen-1.1 source top directory, file "TO_DO".
xbm2cif.tgz is a simple program which converts bitmaps to CIF format for inclusion into layouts. Given that one can do a conversion into XBM format from practically any graphics format using "xv", this program allows basically any graphic to be compiled into CIF and included into layouts. Compile with a simple "cc" command; no special linking is required.
Updated March 2015: Because my programming skills in 1991 were so awful.
Usage: xbm2cif [scale] file_in.xbm file_out.cif
CIO-DIO96.3.1.tgz (v3.1) is a Linux driver program for various ComputerBoards digital I/O cards, namely the CIO-DIO96 board, but also including all of the ISA-based 82C55-based digital I/O cards (CIO-DIO48, CIO-DIO24, NICB-DIO96 clone of the National Instruments ``DIO-96'', PCI-DIO48 and family, and the compact PCI boards as well). Use of this card and driver along with custom C software is how I test all my electronic designs.
Updates:
1. September 5, 2001
2. April 10, 2001 (fixes for PCI-DIO48H compatibility)
3. July 19, 2002 (fixes for Linux kernel version 2.4 compatibility)
4. September 4, 2002 (some Makefile fixes for "make install")
5. February 26, 2003 (correct support for the PCI-DIO24H card)
6. April 28, 2004 (support for ICS Advent cards: PCI-DIO24DB, PCI-DIO24HD, and the /CT variants. Thanks to Corinne Boyer at the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii)
7. June 16, 2005 (support for Linux kernel versions 2.6---see below for earlier kernel versions)
8. August 24, 2006 (bug fix; thanks to Dierdre Horan for the bug report)
CIO-DIO96.2.4.tgz is the version compatible with Linux kernel versions 2.4 and earlier.

For more information, see the Linux Lab Project.

Also see the "test" directory and file "diotest.c" in the driver distribution for example use of the driver.

diowrapper.tgz was contributed by Conrad Rehill; it is a wrapper program designed to act as a frontend for systems controlled by a DIO card. Conrad uses it for various household controls. His DIO card and driver program are "the basis for a home burglar alarm, fire alarm, relay controller for my heat/AC/circulator". See the README file in the top-level directory for more information. In brief: the original driver is in subdirectory dio96/src_driver/. Make and install this first (including loading the dio96.o kernel module). The wrapper software is in subdirectory dio96/src/. Go to that directory and run "make". Executables end up in the dio96/bin directory. I have not had time to play around with these programs, so until I do, I cannot provide much more information on how to use the system.

NICB-DIO96.1.1tar.gz is an outdated version for the NI clone card, also compatible with most of the ComputerBoards DIO-series cards. This older driver is not PCI-compatible, and in general the use of the new driver is much clearer.

Other X11 programs:

gvtk
Every once in a while, an application that I rely upon heavily starts looking obsolete. "gv" has recently been added to that list. It's a great program for viewing PostScript and PDF files, much better than the overblown "acroread" (which won't even read plain PostScript). However, it was written using the Athena 3D widgets. Athough the Athena 3D widget set hardly takes up much disk space, the powers that be no longer include it in standard X11 distributions. And I couldn't figure out how to compile it as a standalone library. So after a year of using the pathetic "ggv", I decided I'd had enough, and I would write my own PostScript and PDF viewer, using the same method I applied to XCircuit and Magic and IRSIM, which is to write it as a Tcl/Tk extension, give it a set of commands for command-line manipulation in the interpreter, and let Tcl/Tk take care of the graphics. Of course, it still uses ghostscript as the underlying rendering engine (and a very good one it is).
What makes gvtk different than the rest? Well, since it's interpreter-based, the GUI is pretty simple for now but can be about as complicated as anyone cares to write the scripts for. The command-line interface is very flexible, allowing for multiple files to be handled, multiple windows to be used, each with its own ghostscript sub-process, and the GUI can worry about how to tile together and track multiple pages and all that other cruft.
The initial version (1.0) is rough around the edges but good enough to use as a viewer (I, for one, will not use ggv again). In the existing GUI, use the left mouse button to pan the image around the window, and use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. Page-Up and Page-Down keys move through the pages, and Home goes to the first page, and End to the last. The File menu button supports file browsing, and multiple windows, and windows with multiple pages. Expect more to come. . .
Source code available here:
gvtk-1.0.1.tgz (July 13, 2009)
xbiff is a modified version of the standard xbiff mail monitor into which I have folded the Xpm pixmap package, allowing full-color mailbox icons. The pixmap icons can be read in from the application defaults, and can use "*pixmapFilePath:" in .Xdefaults just like it uses "*bitmapFilePath:". Behavior is to look for a pixmap down this path, then the current directory; if not found, it then looks for bitmaps of the same name. Supports Xpm pixmap masks (using a color called "None" in the xpm file) and color override information. Xbiff additionally supports audio playing processes to generate different sounds for incoming mail (no, ``You've got mail!'' is not included. . . but you can always record it yourself. . .)
Update: (11/16/99) Bug fix to prevent zombie processes from accumulating after forking the audio play executable.
Update: (7/22/03) Fixed a few problems that prevent compilation on Linux systems.
xbiff.tgz (41KB) is available here.

Sample xbiff pixmap icon.
Required: Xpm extension for X11 (included with modern versions of Linux).
xman is the repaired version of the usual xman program. xman typically does not come with Linux distributions, perhaps because no one ever fixed this error, which causes xman to segmentation fault when the manual page window is popped down. It appears that xman was attempting to close a file descriptor which was not open. Possibly the bug has not been noticed before because other UNIX platforms treat the closing of a null file descriptor in a more graceful manner? Anyway, this program will eventually become obsolete due to the rise of admittedly far superior HTML man pages. But for now, systems come with an ungodly mess of both (not to mention emacs info pages, how-to text pages, latex, and postscript), so I find it useful to have a correctly working xman lying around.
xman.tar.gz is available here and via anonymous ftp.
Xw.tar.gz is a port to Linux (and X11R6, in general) of the HP Xw widget set library. For reference on how to use the Xw widget set, try to get a copy of Douglas A. Young's excellent X Window Systems Programming and Applications with Xt (Prentice Hall, Inc., 1989). For traditional hackers used to using source code as reference, probably enough can be gleaned from the XCircuit source code to get started.
url is a program I wrote in response to a co-worker who asked if it were possible to print the URL at the top of a Netscape printout, which he says is possible under all versions of Netscape except the UNIX one. This little program, an exercise in understanding X11 "Atoms" and Widget trees, will search out the window on your display running Netscape and request the current URL from it. The optional first parameter to url is a (remote) display name, so you can see what Netscape page someone else is reading, as long as they have X11 access enabled (i.e., xhost +)!
Updated 3/2/00 with a bug fix by Robert Mitchell of WFF/NASA which prevents url from getting confused by Netscape windows other than the Print window, and picks up the _MOZILLA_URL Atom from the correct window.
Simple (manual) compile instructions are written in the first few comment lines of the program.
urlfilter is the companion script written by Ed Hawkins III at JHU-APL for getting the url program to write the current URL to the top of the printed page. Format is to put the web page title on the upper left hand corner and the URL on the upper right hand corner. Format adjusts appropriately for both portrait and landscape page orientations. The PostScript statements in the filter script can be customized to change the font and appearance of the URL title on the page.
To use urlfilter, from the Netscape Print window, select
Print Command: urlfilter | lpr
(i.e., prepend the urlfilter and pipe into whatever program you use for the print spooler).
urlfilter.pl is a port of the urlfilter script (above) to Perl. Make sure you configure this script so that the first line points to your Perl executable (/usr/bin/perl on Linux, but may be elsewhere on other systems), and that the variable $URL points to the executable for url.c (above). Thanks to Robert Mitchell for this script. urlfilter.awk is a variation of the urlfilter script using awk instead of sh or perl (above), kindly provided by Jonathan R. Senning (senning@gordon.edu), math and CS professor at Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts. He has added page numbering and date, printed at the bottom of the page. By streaming the input, it works faster than the Perl and Shell versions and does not alter the original Netscape PostScript output. This is probably the best of the ``urlfilter'' versions listed here, and I recommend it over the others.
RPM packages of urlfilter also provided by Jonathan Senning:
- Source: urlfilter-1.0-1.src.rpm
- i386 Binary: urlfilter-1.0-1.i386.rpm
- PowerPC Binary: urlfilter-1.0-1.ppc.rpm
xtdnn is a program which I wrote in 1991 for drawing and solving time-delay neural networks (temporal backpropagation). Connections and their strengths are drawn on-screen in color and updated during the learning process.
Required: Xw widget set.
xdigit is one of my past research topics in acoustic classification: a speech recognition network which uses time delays, except that it relies on basic hebbian learning, a perceptron-like one-layer network, and is geared toward analog hardware implementation.
Required: Xw widget set.

UNIX utility programs:

tgrind is a Linux port (and in general, a slightly updated version) of tgrind by Van Jacobson (1985, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory), which itself was adapted from an even earlier program called "vgrind" (based on troff, and essentially obsolete for that very reason). "tgrind" is a "pretty printing" formatter which uses TeX as its underlying text processor, used primarily for generating nice PostScript listings of C programs.
hpduplex is the C source code for an lpd printer driver to act as an output filter for a printer like the HP LaserJet-4 with double-sided printing capability. Using this executable, the printer is called by two names (in our case, ``hp1'' and ``hp2'') to get single- and double-sided output, respectively, if the printcap file is setup as in this sample. For the most part, this has been superceded by simple filters as described in the printing HOW-TO. I have not used a meta-filter like this one in practice for years, mostly because newer printers are usually smart enough to tell the difference between text and PostScript, and those that have duplex printing or multiple-tray sources can be controlled through simple postscript commands prepended to the output by the "if" filter.
ps2pcl.c is a simple program to drive a hp560c or other HP PCL-compatible color inkject printer as a color PostScript® device. This file must be compiled and the executable placed in someplace obvious like /var/spool/hp560c/, which is how it is set up for this sample printcap file. Note that the system configuration shown here was an hp560c connected to the parallel port (/dev/plp) of an SGI Indigo workstation. With this printcap file, any color PostScript® file can be sent directly to the printer by the command:
lpr -Pcolorps filename.ps
Comment: This method is outdated for the same reason as mentioned in the previous item.
trace.tar.gz. The program trace is the UNIX system call tracer for IRIX; used to be a UNIX standard, was probably considered too useful a tool for hackers (like "adb") and discontinued. A recent look for source code of trace yielded only an outdated version for IRIX 5.0.something. I updated this code to work under (at least) IRIX 5.3. It will also work under IRIX 6.2 (since I made some changes (Nov. 1998)), though I have not done a thorough check to see if it handles all system calls known to IRIX 6.2.
binedit.c is an extremely simple vi-like binary editor. Only implements a few commands from vi, but this is enough to allow a person to load, search through, and change individual bytes in a binary file. Includes the vi commands delete(x), insert(i), replace-character(r), replace(R), move(h,j,k,l,0,$), move-eof(G), status(^G), save-and-quit(ZZ), search(/), search-next(n), goto-line(:#), quit(q), write(w). Implements command "format" (f) to switch between hexidecimal, decimal, and character modes. "Lines" in the binary file are determined by the number of bytes per line displayed on the screen. Very useful for looking at binary file header information, hacking machine code, etc. Due to the available modes of display, binary output is easier to read and deal with than emacs or nvi output of nonprintable characters.

Notices:

Please contact me if you find that any web links are broken.
Some of the X11 programs listed here (namely xtdnn and xcircuit) use the Xw widget set, originally freeware from Hewlett-Packard. When I last checked, this package was becoming increasingly difficult to find anywhere on the Web. It is also getting increasingly out of date. Personally, I am moving to Motif as my main widget interface, not because I like it so much as because it is a reasonably modern interface. GTK is probably even better, but since it redefines all the basic Xt commands, it will take a lot of work to get used to it (it's better for building X11 source from scratch rather than to convert an existing interface). Motif also is more usable since Lesstif (the Motif-compatible freeware package) came on the scene.
A few other programs listed below use the Xpm extension for X11 which gives support for pixmaps. Fortunately, RedHat Linux and I believe some other operating systems now consider it a UNIX standard. If your system does not have Xpm installed, The package is available from sunsite.unc.edu under the /pub/X11/contrib/ directory, file xpm-3.4j.tar.gz. Also in the sunsite X11 libraries directory is an xpm tutorial and collection of xpm examples.
From 1998, xpm appears to have stabilized at version 3.4k: xpm-3.4k.tar.gz
Please contact me if you have any difficulty compiling this package or any of the programs listed here which depend on it. Clicking on the file name above will automatically transfer the 93KB compressed source file to your site.
Note: I have not looked at the source since version 3.2.

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---As always, Caveat end-user.

Last updated: March 10, 2015 at 3:36pm