EDIF

Electronic Design Interchange Format ( EDIF ) is a machine- readable format for the electronic exchange of netlists and schematics between electronic design automation systems (EDA ) systems;

It is published by the Electronic Industries Alliance ( EIA), is hierarchical and uses brackets to delimit data.

The EDIF has been 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 European ( EN 61690-1 and EN 61690-2 by ).

In the Y- model EDIF is located between physical and structural point of view and switch between level and register-transfer level.

Prehistory

Due to the competition in the electronic design industry at the beginning of the 1980s have been widely used proprietary databases. As a result, it was necessary for each data exchange between different systems, previously to write a converter. With an increasing number of formats, the number of necessary conversions grew.

Therefore, EDIF has been designed as a common and neutral format, from which all other formats can be derived. In November 1983, emerged from these efforts the EDIF Steering Committee, consisting 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 it is syntactically similar to LISP. The elementary tokens of EDIF 2 0 0 were keywords ( such as library, cell, instance ), with quotation marks separated strings, integers, symbolic constants (eg GENERIC, TIE, RIPPER for cell types ) as well as identifiers.

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

Revision history

• EDIF 1 0 0 was created in 1985.

• The first public release was EDIF EDIF 2 0 0, which was standardized in 1988 as ANSI/EIA-548-1988.

• After years of testing in the industry and numerous analyzes of weaknesses, was published in 1993 EDIF 3 0 0, which was given the designation as EIA standard EIA- 618. Later EDIF 3 0 0 also got ANSI and ISO designations.

• EDIF 4 0 0 1996 mainly issued for the purpose of 3 0 0 to printed circuit boards and multi-chip modules ( MCMs ) to expand manufacturing drawings and technology requirements. -

Development

Problems with 2 0 0

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

The first supplier of software ( for example, Daisy, Mentor and Valid ) fought hard for their market share. One of the tactics used here was the customer loyalty through proprietary databases. Each of these databases had unique features that distinguish the systems from the competition. This threatened the customer with system change a costly migration, where much of the data had to be re-entered by hand. Moreover, migration costs rose steadily through the continuous use of the software. Since the quality of individual design modules, however, to software often differed dramatically from software calls were quickly after a neutral solution, according to which enabled an exchange of data between products.

EDIF 2 0 0, however, was supported mainly by the end user in the design industry while the main interest of software vendors was to powerful import filters and export filters are often implemented only after massive threats of large customers. As a result, there was hardly an EDIF 2 0 0 export filter, which did not violate flagrantly against the standard. This was made possible, inter alia, that the EDIF 2 0 0 semantics allow multiple paths for data declaration. In the end it was thus very labor (and therefore cost ) intensive to write a high-quality EDIF converter.

Solutions of EDIF 2 0 0 problems

As a result of stricter syntax in EDIF 3 0 0 the development of import filters was almost trivial, whereas the development of export filters designed significantly more difficult.

As a solution to the conflict of interests of the software vendor occur neutral third party, who could through the software interface develop EDIF products. This separation of the EDIF products of the direct control of the manufacturer proved to be essential to provide the engineers with well-functioning tools. In 2000, almost no manufacturer used its own EDIF tools anymore, but used tools from other manufacturers.

Since the release of EDIF 4 0 0, the EDIF standard organization has dissolved essential. Almost all the people involved have switched to other companies or aspirations. EDIF 3 0 0 4 0 0 now ANSI, IEC and EN European standards. EDIF Version 3 0 0 is IEC / EN 61690-1 and EDIF Version 4 0 0 IEC / EN 61690-2.