01 Skill Introduction

Introduction to SKILL programming
Module 1:
Sharifsab Nadaf
18 May 2019
Table of Contents
• SKILL programming – What and Why?

• How it works?
• Get Help - Options
• Possibilities in SKILL
• PROS of SKILL
• Data types –
• Numbers, Strings and Lists
• List and String operations
2
SKILL programming – What and Why?
• Developed and copyrighted by Cadence Design Systems

• Published in 1990 in IEEE DAC conference
• Can be used only in Cadence Environment
• IL  SCIL  SKIL  SKILL

• SKILL  Not an acronym. It’s a trademark preferred by Cadence
• Flavour of LISP
• LisP  List Processor. Linked lists are the major data structures
• SKILL can also be written in LISP style
• strcat( “Welcome" “ to " " SKILL" " programming" " session" )
• (strcat “Welcome" “ to " " SKILL" " programming" " session" )
• Yahoo store, AutoCAD
3
SKILL programming – What and Why? -- contd
• High level, Interactive language
• SKILL  cmd language for the Cadence environment

• GUI operations triggers SKILL functions in the background
Why
• Why Automation?
• Layout  Most time consuming task in design cycle
• Cadence  Most used software in VLSI Industry
4
How it works?
• SKILL  Interfacing between the USER

user and CDB
SKILL
• DFII – Cadence Database Format
• Various types of Objects C funcs
• Unique dbid for each object
CDB
• All SKILL/Cadence Virtuoso
functions are written in C
• Why can’t we use C functions

directly, instead of SKILL as an
intermediate functions?
Get help - Options
• startFinder()
• SKILL help document

• Press F1 in CIW
• /tools/cds/<Virtuoso version>/doc/sk* documents
• sklanguser.pdf
• sklayoutref.pdf
• Type “cdnshlep”
• Expert’s guidance - Support by Cadence and its users

• Cadence user community
• https://community.cadence.com/cadence_technology_forums/f/custom-ic-skill
• CIW  Options  Log filter  Enable all options

6
Possibilities in SKILL
• Virtually unlimited – Equivalent to Cadence GUI software
• Text processing
• Arithmetic, Logical and Comparison operations
• File processing
• Regular expressions – Pattern matching
• Database operations
• Create, edit and delete cellviews, libraries, shapes, instances, pcells
• GUI operations – Forms and Windows
• Menu bars
• Invoke and execute tools – ADE for simulation
• No graph mode operation
7
PROS of SKILL
• Memory management - No burden on programmer

• Rapid prototyping
• IPC function – To deal with different programs, tools
• Basic common functions to all tools
• IDE - Easy to debug and line by line run

• Quality check - SKILL lint
• Database objects - DFII and Accessing
8
How to Start?
• SKILL commands/functions has to be executed in CIW

• Single line can be executed or a procedure(function in general)
• procedure  keyword to define a function
• Ex : procedure(welcome(name)
print(“Welcome to Vaishnavi VLSI training center”)
print(“Welcome to SKILL programming session”)
)
• Function needs to be called by its name.
• Ex : welcome(name)
• Procedure can be written in a file and can be loaded in CIW as below
• load(“/home/users/sharifsab_Nadaf/SKILL/welcome.il”)
• loadi(“/home/users/sharifsab_Nadaf/SKILL/welcome.il”)
• .il  Indicates it’s a skill file.

9
Data types
• Basic data types of SKILL
• Integer 5
• Floating point 5.35
• String “SKILL_Programming”
• List list(1 2 3 4 5)
• Data base IDs dx---------------
10
Lists
list1 = list(0 1 2 3 4 5)
list2 = list(-2 -1 0 1.5 4.34 )
list3 = list( 0 1 “testString” list(6 7 8) variable 7e5)
11
List operations
• length
• append1
• cons
• car
• cdr
• nth
• nthelem
• member
• last
12
String operations
• parseString
• evalString
• buildString
• strcat
• strlen
• nindex
• getchar
13
REFERENCES
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadence_SKILL
• https://community.cadence.com
• http://pwp.gatech.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/367/2016/03/Intro_to_skill_prog.pdf
14
Thank You
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Introduction to SKILL programming

• SKILL programming – What and Why?

• Developed and copyrighted by Cadence Design Systems

• IL  SCIL  SKIL  SKILL

• High level, Interactive language

• SKILL  cmd language for the Cadence environment

• Layout  Most time consuming task in design cycle

• Cadence  Most used software in VLSI Industry

• SKILL  Interfacing between the USER

• Why can’t we use C functions

• SKILL help document

• Expert’s guidance - Support by Cadence and its users

• CIW  Options  Log filter  Enable all options

• Virtually unlimited – Equivalent to Cadence GUI software

• Memory management - No burden on programmer

• IDE - Easy to debug and line by line run

• SKILL commands/functions has to be executed in CIW

• .il  Indicates it’s a skill file.

• Basic data types of SKILL

• Floating point 5.35

• Data base IDs dx---------------

list2 = list(-2 -1 0 1.5 4.34 )

list3 = list( 0 1 “testString” list(6 7 8) variable 7e5)

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