You might want to take a look at how Xilinx ISE and similar products
handle this. Their tools take in Verilog or VHDL and can produce a
graphical representation of the resulting logic. It's not as readable
as a hand-drawn schematic but it exists and enough people find it
useful that Xilinx maintains it.
-Reece
On 5/3/19 6:38 PM, Russell Oliver wrote:
I have no doubt about the difficulty of plumbing something like this
feature into KiCad. Most things are easier said than done.
A few thoughts in response
1. My initial thought was to skip generating a graphical schematic,
and to simply join in essence two or more netlists while avoiding name
conflicts. It seems convoluted to start with essentially a
connectivity graph, only to create a graphical representation for it
be be evaluated to create a connectivity graph. It begs the questions
then, should/could there be a text based representation of the
connectivity graph created by eeschema with the information needed to
perform ERC?
No ERC would be performed between the eeshema Netlist and the Skidl
netlist. This would be left as a design task. The only ERC check would
be on the hierarchical pins which would be predefined by the user as
the interface to the SKIDL generated netlist. Users could be warned
that ERC information doesn't exist for some components.
2. Thinking about it further the task of generating a graphical
schematic shouldn't be too difficult using the SKIDL library. I
suspect Dave would be disappointed in me for being addicted to
schematics. A simple grid based layout with plenty of room between
symbols and using straight line between pins to create connections
would be possible. This would easiest once Eeschema has python support
and the new file format.
2. Editing SKIDL scripts as subsheets I envisage would either be
through a user defined text editor, or a basic one implemented into
KiCad. Once the edit has been done, the file would be evaluated
through the python runtime with the Skidl library (or for a more
generic solution a user specified command line, with the output
captured back as a netlist or schematic).
3. Editing of the resulting components through the edit symbol fields
dialog I think would be possible but only as a one way operation once
the generated netlist/schematic has been added. In that sense it would
be up to the user to maintain that information in the script so that
it is generated each time.
Kind Regards
Russell
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