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Verilog to Routing -- Open Source CAD Flow for FPGA Research
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Support drawing dummy / spacer track as white (or support coloring tracks) #341

Open mithro opened 6 years ago

mithro commented 6 years ago

We have found it useful to add "dummy" or "spacer" tracks to make it easier to see what is happening in the GUI.

As these dummy / spacer tracks are not really used in routing (they have no input / output) it would be good if we could color these track white so they appear as a "gap" in the GUI.

See an example of how it could appear....

image

An alternative would be to support drawing each track type in a given color (in the same way each different block type is drawn in a different color).

kmurray commented 6 years ago

Drawing the track/segment types in different colours seems like a good enhancement, it's often hard to figure out the type of a track in the GUI. Taking inspiration from the generated colours used for block types also makes sense.

The one challenge here is that we already use colours to differentiate different connections in the GUI (i.e. the 'Toggle RR' button) so we would need to pick colours which don't clash with those already in use.

Having some amount of user control (e.g. specifying a segments colour) would help address the dummy track issue. However it's not clear where best to put this information. One option is to put it into the arch.xml with something like:

<segment name="DUMMY" ...>
  <colour name="WHITE"/>
</segment>

The disadvantage of this is that it starts mixing tool-specific configuration (e.g. segment drawing colour) into the architecture description, which seems undesirable.