Electronic Design Interchange Format

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Electronic Design Interchange Format ( EDIF ) is a data format for the electronic exchange of network lists and circuit diagrams between electronic design automation systems (EDA systems);

It is published by the Electronic Industries Alliance (EIA), has a hierarchical structure and uses brackets to separate data.

The EDIF was standardized by the EIA and in versions 3 0 0 (September 1993) and 4 0 0 (August 1996) by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and in Europe (by EN 61690-1 and EN 61690-2).

In the Y model , EDIF is located between the physical and structural view and between the counter level and the register transfer level .

prehistory

Due to the competition in the electronic design industry, proprietary databases were often used in the early 1980s. As a result, it was necessary to write a converter beforehand for every data exchange between different systems. As the number of formats increased, so did the number of conversions required.

Therefore, EDIF was designed as a common and neutral format from which all other formats can be derived. In November 1983 these efforts resulted in the EDIF Steering Committee, which consisted of representatives from Cadence , Daisy Systems , Mentor Graphics , Motorola , National Semiconductor , Tektronix , Texas Instruments and the University of California, Berkeley .

syntax

The basic format of EDIF separates the data definitions with brackets, which means that it is syntactically based on Lisp . The elementary tokens of EDIF 2 0 0 were keywords (such as library , cell , instance ), strings separated by quotation marks, whole numbers, symbolic constants (e.g. GENERIC , TIE , RIPPER for cell types) and identifiers.

In EDIF 3 0 0 and 4 0 0, symbolic constants have been completely dropped and replaced with keywords.

history

  • EDIF 1 0 0 was created in 1985.
  • The first public EDIF release was EDIF 2 0 0, which was standardized as ANSI / EIA-548-1988 in 1988.
  • After several years of tests in the industry and numerous analyzes of the weaknesses, EDIF 3 0 0 was published in 1993, which was designated as EIA standard EIA-618. Later, EDIF 3 0 0 also got ANSI and ISO designations.

development

Problems with 2 0 0

To understand the problems with EDIF 2 0 0, one must first consider all of the elements and dynamics of the electronics industry. The main beneficiaries of the standard were design engineers in companies of all sizes. These engineers mostly worked with circuit diagrams and network plans. The latter should be generated automatically from the circuit diagrams in the late 1980s.

The first software suppliers (e.g. Daisy, Mentor and Valid) fought hard for their market share. One of the tactics used here was customer loyalty through proprietary databases. Each of these databases had unique features that set the systems apart from the competition. As a result, the customer was threatened with an expensive migration when changing systems, in which a large part of the data had to be re-entered by hand. In addition, the migration costs rose continuously due to the continued use of the software. However, since the quality of the individual design modules often differed drastically from software to software, calls for a neutral solution that enabled data to be exchanged between the individual products were quickly heard.

However, EDIF 2 0 0 was mainly supported by the end customers of the design industry, while the main interest of the software manufacturers was in high-performance import filters and export filters were often only implemented after massive threats from large customers. As a result, there was hardly an EDIF 2 0 0 export filter that did not blatantly violate the standard. This was made possible, among other things, by the fact that the EDIF 2 0 0 semantics allowed several ways of data declaration. In the end, this made it very labor-intensive (and therefore also cost-intensive) to write a high-quality EDIF converter.

Solutions to EDIF 2 0 0 problems

As a result of the tightening of syntax in EDIF 3 0 0, the development of import filters became downright trivial, whereas the development of export filters turned out to be much more difficult.

Neutral third-party manufacturers, who were able to develop EDIF products using the software interfaces, appear as a solution to the conflict of interests of the software manufacturers. This separation of EDIF products from the direct control of the manufacturers turned out to be imperative in order to provide the engineers with well-functioning tools. In 2000, almost no manufacturer was using its own EDIF tools anymore, but using tools from other manufacturers.

Since the publication of EDIF 4 0 0, the EDIF standard organization has essentially dissolved. Almost everyone involved has switched to other companies or endeavors. EDIF 3 0 0 and 4 0 0 are now ANSI , IEC and European EN standards. EDIF Version 3 0 0 is IEC / EN 61690-1 and EDIF Version 4 0 0 is IEC / EN 61690-2.

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