pcb-rnd knowledge pool
Plans on hierarchic netlists
| net_hier by Tibor 'Igor2' Palinkas on 2017-05-30 | Tags: insight, plans, history, hierarchical, netlist, hierarchy |
Abstract: Subcircutions will eventually support a generic tree when subcircuit-in-subcircuit is available. This may lead to support of hierarchic netlists.
Imported from the mailing list archives.
However, the data model rewrite effort is huge, and will take a lot of time to fully finish.
As of 2017
1. the main goal now is to replace special cased footprints with generic ones; which means we won't have subcircuit-in-subcircuit (footprint-in-footprint) in the first iteration. If we manage to do only the footprint model fixup, and somehow fail on every other future aspects, we already made a huge step forward.
2. Whenever we decide to have that recursion, how we handle the netlist is mostly a netlist question, it won't require too much support or change in subcirctuits. I can't imagine bad design decisions about subcircuits now could seriously affect the netlist interfacing later. (The harder part is the layer mapping in such a recursion)
3. there's a popular demand for hierarchical netlists, I suspect that would pretty easily just click in with hierarchical subcircuits.
Thus the question of hierarchical netlists is postponed for now.