On Sunday, January 6, 2019, David Lanzendörfer <david.lanzendoerfer@o2s.ch> wrote:

Hi

> when i last looked at alliance / coriolis2, it had the ability to
> design "Cells" which could recursively be added to other "Cells", thus
> building up libraries of regular parts.
>
> and, crucially, if a standard library is published, only the
> specification of the "Cell" needs to be known, *not* its contents.
>
> i did not see anything in magic similar to this capability. did i
> miss anything?
Yes. You did miss "getcell subcell.mag" which allows you to insert multiple
instances of a magic file into another magic file.

By selecting the inserted instance and after running "select area" you can
even move it around by using "move x y

That's perfect, exactly what is needed, to do bottom up design.

Next question, are netlists shown in tracer lines? And, can nets be assigned to the cells loaded from other magic files, such that when moving the cell about the tracers of unrouted nets will follow? That is standard behaviour from PCB layout and it is unbelievably useful for doing floorplans and placement of cells.

The traces give you a feel for the optimal location of the cell, as once all the traces look like they are equidistant from everything else it is connected to, you probably got the placement just about right :)

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