Hello Andreas and Hagen,
The second question is about finding an equivalent STA tool to `vesta`. STA is performed after Placing and then again after Routing, is this correct?
STA tools are checking, whether the design - from a perspective of timing - still reaches the timing requirements. While with placement there is not a trustworthy source of timing information, the STA becomes useful after the Routing step. With routing, the wires gets there delay.
The tool that I am leaning toward for qflow is OpenTimer, which is equivalent to vesta and has a number of options that I have not had the time to code into vesta. The only issue with OpenTimer is that it wants standard SPEF or SDF files as input. I have not been able to verify the syntax of these file formats. Qrouter generates its own parasitic output which works in vesta, and since it is fairly straightforward to convert to either SPEF or SDF, I have provided those files as output in an attempt to start integration with OpenTimer. But I can't finish it until I can confirm that these output files are correct (or fix them if they aren't).
Also bear in mind that "vesta + asking Tim to code up functions you need" is a viable alternative. ---Tim
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