polychip

Python program to extract a netlist of NMOS transistors from an Inkscape diagram, and recognize various gates.

Prerequisites

Python 3.6 or above

• Windows: Get it here. Alternatively, run Bash on Ubuntu on Windows and follow the instructions for Ubuntu 14.04.
• Ubuntu: Run lsb_release -a to determine your Ubuntu version. Then follow the advice given here under the appropriate version.
• Debian: Follow the advice given here.
• OSX: Get it here

Python packages: install with pip

$ pip3 -V

If the above doesn't show your version of python, then you'll have to read up on using virtual environments. If you never want to use a previous version of python again (and really, who does?), then feel free to overwrite pip like so: curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py | sudo python3.6 (or whatever your python version is).

Then: $ sudo pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Usage

usage: polychip.py [-h] [--sch] [--nets] [--qs] <file>

Polychip, a program to help recognize transistors and gates in an Inkscape
file traced from an NMOS integrated circuit.

positional arguments:
  <file>      input Inkscape SVG file

optional arguments:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit
  --sch       whether to generate a KiCAD .sch file (output to polychip.sch, use eeschema to view!)
  --nets      whether to print the netlist
  --qs        whether to print the transistor locations

Instructions

Open the polychip-template.svg file in Inkscape. Instructions on how to organize your drawing is in that file.

You can run the program like so:

$ python3.6 polychip/polychip.py <svg-file> --nets --qs

Try it out on polychip-template.svg!

The output will show you how many transistors, contacts, diff, poly, and metal were found. Errors are displayed for contacts only attaching one diff, poly, or metal, and for text that violates the requirements set forth in the template file. Errors are also displayed for poly, diff, or metal not connected to anything else, and for transistors with fewer than two electrodes detected.

The netlist is a dictionary. The key is the net name, or an anonymous numbered net if no net name was defined for the net on the SNames layer. The value is a set of transistor connections, of the format (Type.terminal>, qname, where <terminal> is GATE for the gate, and E0 and E1 for the two electrodes (N is meaningless), and qname is either the name of the transistor as defined on the QNames layer, or a unique number.

Tests and examples

You can run all tests like so:

$ python3.6 polychip/tests.py

There are many test files in the test directory that you can use as examples. You can run polychip on any of them to see what the output looks like.

Schematic output

Currently Polychip only outputs a KiCAD .sch file which you can open with KiCAD's eeschema program. It relies on the included project5474.lib file, and you will probably have to configure KiCAD to include that library in its global component libraries.

It will only place the transistors and some of the gate types it recognized, and will not (yet) wire them up.