Electronics Forum / CAD / July 2005

If I understand correctly, a standard text-based line compare tool won't
work because it reports differences that don't matter to you?

If so, can you give me an example of two lines that are different, but
you want to be treated as the same? Or, if I missed the point, the kinds
of things that need to be different from a line compare tool.

I was just googling and found:
http://winmerge.sourceforge.net/

Seems more powerful than windiff, and has some configurable features,
but not sure if it could be trained to do what you want.

[...]

What format are the net lists?  Did the references change from one version
to the next or is it only the net names and some interconnections?

Where I work we use a perl script to compare net lists in the PADS2K
format.  It almost works right.

These people:
http://www.iceditors.com/products/products.html

do a PC layout tool and a DRC and a NLE (Netlist Extractor tool) that works
with their LVS Tool.

Their site seems to say it can compare netlists when it claims:
" LVS program compares netlists: LVL, SVS, and LVS "

where the "SVS" seems to mean "Schematic vs Schematic".

They also say:
" Accepts schematic netlists in CDL, SPICE, PSPICE, and HSPICE dialects "

May be what you want but it may only compare netlists from two instances of
the same tool.

Robert