Back-annotation readers

This repository contains SPEF and SDF readers used to back-annotate an ACT design. SPEF back-annotation works with the netlist generation pass, augmenting the output netlist with parasitics. The SDF reader is used with the ACT simulator for SDF-based delays.

SPEF

SPEF files are associated with each ACT process. There are two ways to select the SPEF file associated with an ACT process:

• The file can be called <processname>.spef, where <processname> is the full ACT process name (including namespace qualifiers for processes in namespaces other than the global namespace).
• An ACT configuration file SPEF section can be used to specify the file name for each process as follows:

begin spef
 string <process1> "filename"
 string <process2> "filename2"
end

SDF

SDF files are read once for the entire design, starting at the top-level. SDF annotations are matched using CELLTYPE and INSTANCE fields. The CELLTYPE field matches the process name, and INSTANCE field matches the ACT instance.

Build instructions

This library is for use with the ACT toolkit.

• Please install the ACT toolkit first; installation instructions are here.
• Build this program using the standard ACT tool install instructions here.