COUGAR(1)

📦 version 5.1.1, in fedora 43, fedora 44

🦋 cougar(1) — ALLIANCE USER COMMANDS 🦋

hi bestie 💖 welcome to the glow-up era of cougar, a hierarchical netlist extractor, straight out of the ALLIANCE USER COMMANDS manual. she's iconic, she's French, she extracts. let's get into it 🌸

✨ NAME ✨

cougar — hierarchical netlist extractor 🎀

🫶 SYNOPSIS 🫶

cougar [ -v ] [ -c ] [ -f ] [ -t ] [ -ar ] [ -ac ] input_name [ output_name ]

🌈 ORIGIN 🌈

okay so this software belongs to the ALLIANCE CAD SYSTEM, developed by the ASIM team at the LIP6 laboratory of Université Pierre et Marie CURIE, in Paris, France 🇫🇷✨

💜 DESCRIPTION 💜

the lore first: Lynx changed its name to Cougar during May 2002 in order to avoid name conflict with the famous text-mode Web browser. no cap, she rebranded and ate 💅

Cougar is a hierarchical layout extractor. She builds a netlist of interconnections from a symbolic layout view 🔥

  • the input argument is the name of the symbolic layout cell to be extracted, using as input format the one selected by the MBK_IN_PH(1) environment variable 🌸
  • if output is present, the resulting netlist will be given this name 🎀
  • if no output is given, then input will also be the generated netlist name 👑
  • the output format is specified by the MBK_OUT_LO(1) environment variable ✨

As most of the Alliance cad tools, cougar uses mbk(1) environment variables. Those are:

  • MBK_CATA_LIB(1)
  • MBK_WORK_LIB(1)
  • MBK_IN_PH(1)
  • MBK_OUT_LO(1)
  • RDS_TECHNO_NAME(1)

Cougar computes capacitances attached to the signals if the -ac option is set 🧚. At the moment, the value of these capacitances is computed for a typical one micron technology, and cannot be changed by the user through a technology file 😭. The extracted netlist can be simulated for performance evaluation.

The typical capacitances are given below in 10e-18 farad / lamda^2 :

  • POLY — 100
  • ALU1 — 50
  • ALU2 — 25

💅 OPTIONS 💅

first, the rules, because Cougar checks the two basic ALLIANCE rules regarding connector names 👇

  • if two physical connectors are connected to the same net, they must have the same name 🫶
  • if two physical connectors have the same name, they must be internally connected to the same net 🫶

as a result only one logical connector will appear in the netlist ✨ A fatal error occurs if one of those two rules is violated ( even for power and ground connectors ) 💀

When no options are specified, the current hierarchical level is extracted. The resulting netlist is the list of interconnections of the current layout hierarchy level. Three options are available to change cougar behaviour 👇

  • -t — Notifies a transistor level extraction, the symbolic layout cell is flattened to transistor layout before extraction 🔥
  • -f — The symbolic layout cell is flattened to the catalog level before extraction. Use "man catal" for detail on the catalog file. If the catalog is empty, or doesn't exist, the netlist is an interconection of transistors, if it isn't, the netlist is an interconection of gates or blocks whose names are defined in the catalog 📚
  • -v — Verbose mode on. Each step of the extraction is displayed on the standard output, along with some statistics 📊

and the rest of the flag family, she has range 👑👇

  • -c — Generates a core file representing the conflictuel net, when cougar detects two external connectors with different names on the same signal, or when it finds two external connectors having the same name but not internally connected to the same net, or when it cannot correctly extract an L shaped transistor 💀
  • -ac — Extract capacitance to ground on losig ⚡
  • -ar — Extract interconnect resistance and capacitance to ground. Value of resistance foreach layer can be changed in the RDS file 🛠️

🍓 EXAMPLES 🍓

prompt> cougar -v amd2901

Gives a logical netlist of the chip amd2901, for one hierarchical level, using verbose mode ✨ This would be typically used to verify the work of the ring(1) router, in conjunction with lvx on the specificated netlist and the extracted one 🔍

prompt> cat $MBK_WORK_LIB/$MBK_CATAL_NAME
a2_y
a2p_y
 .
 .
prompt> cougar -f amd2901

Gives a logical netlist of the chip amd2901, after a flatten operation stopping on the cells specified in the catalog ( the standard cell library in our case ) 🎀

prompt> cougar -t amd2901

Gives a logical netlist of the amd2901 chip at the transistor level 🔥 This is useful with yagle(1), to retrieve logical equations from a layout 🧠

🌸 SEE ALSO 🌸

  • al(5)
  • MBK_CATA_LIB(1)
  • MBK_WORK_LIB(1)
  • MBK_CATAL_NAME(1)
  • MBK_IN_PH(1)
  • catal(5)
  • RDS_TECHNO_NAME(1)

🫶 BUG REPORT 🫶

This tool is under development at the ASIM department of the LIP6 laboratory 🛠️

We need your feedback to improve documentation and tools 💌 (yes, your feedback, bestie, they literally said so)

ASIM/LIP6 — October 1, 1997 🎂 that's the source, the version, and the date, all wrapped up in a cute little sign-off because that's just how we do it around here 💖 slay, extract, repeat ✨🦋👑

📦 where this page comes from