Hierarchical components/graphical components

Hierarchical components/graphical components

[Onno Kortmann]

Hi,

now that I played around a bit with SID, I have a couple of questions:

1.) Is there a way to make a prototype setup and declare a component out of 
this prototype setup, or some way of nesting configurations to enable 
hierarchies of components? For example, I'd like to have a microcontroller 
with the embedded periphery modeled as separate SID components but have the 
whole setup appear as another component in SID which I can reuse multiple 
times in a higher-level setup.

2.) Are there graphical editors for SID setups? More complicated setups are 
easier to edit graphically, I think. I'm thinking of something like a 
netlister for gschem or similar.

Best regards,

Onno

Re: Hierarchical components/graphical components

[Frank Ch. Eigler]

Hi -

On Sun, Jun 11, 2006 at 04:10:35PM +0200, Onno Kortmann wrote:

> [...]
> 1.) Is there a way to make a prototype setup and declare a component out of 
> this prototype setup, or some way of nesting configurations to enable 
> hierarchies of components? [...]

We have no support for that in the raw configuration language.  It
should not be hard to write a tcl script to perform the subsystem
configuration and to turn that into a first-class component, but it
would have to handle intricacies like passing down pin/bus
connectivity and attribute value traffic.  Extending cfgroot to
implement some sort of nesting directly would not be hard either, but
then one has to define not just the instantiation operation (which
sounds easy on paper), but also the create-a-composite-component
operation (which is hard: needs to define not just inner connectivity,
but also all the external-internal interfaces).

> 2.) Are there graphical editors for SID setups? [...]

Sorry, I don't now of any.  We didn't get far enough with hand-written
configurations to justify this.  If anything, the command-line-based
configuration generator system was a movement in the other direction.


- FChE