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2019 04 14

Matthias Köfferlein edited this page Apr 14, 2019 · 12 revisions

Netlist Compare

This blog is about the netlist compare feature. It wasn't planned or anticipated, yet I think it may be quite useful. I needed such a feature, because the netlist extractor tends to produce slightly different netlists on different platforms (due to STL differences, specifically in the hash container implementation). A pure text compare wasn't sufficient, so I started a netlist compare function, not being aware of the complexity that awaits me.

The basic idea is twofold:

1.) The netlist with it's nets, devices and subcircuits is transformed into a simple graph 2.) The graphs of both netlists are compared with a backtracking approach

Simple graph representation

A circuit's netlist is made from nets, devices and subcircuits. Nets make the nodes of the graph. Devices and subcircuits mitigate between these nodes. So essentially they created edges between the net nodes.

The following picture describes the idea:

... insert picture ...

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