TCL

The Tcl training course covers the essentials of the language and its application in the field of PLD and ASIC design. It is packed full of examples and exercises all directly based on design related problems, and covers the need-to-know essentials for design engineers and EDA support specialists.

Tcl is a popular and widely used cross-platform script programming language that achieves significant productivity gains when used by skilled engineers. Its combination of text processing, file manipulation and system control features make it ideal for this purpose.

Almost every industry-leading EDA tool uses it to provide a powerful and platform-independent command language. The course covers the essential subset of the Tcl scripting language, with design related exercises and examples including running EDA tools and extracting key information from report and source files.

Course Agenda:

• Introduction
• Origins of Tcl
• Exploring the benefits of Tcl in the digital design flow
• Internet resources for problem solving and sharing solutions
• Reference materials for the language
• Getting Started
• Running Tcl Shell in UNIX or Windows
• Experimenting with commands in the shell
• Creating and running a script file
• Variables and substitution
• Launching other commands
• Command substitution
• Structure of a Tcl command
• Quoting
• Reading the keyboard
• The basics of Tcl
• More on substitution and quoting
• Tcl grammar rules
• Comments
• Some common commands
• Lists and strings
• Launching other commandsusing exec
• Environment variables
• File manipulation
• Creating Real Programs
• Commands for flow control
• Procedures and arguments
• Default arguments
• Scope
• Return values
• Opening Files
• Reading and writing files
• Formatting data as text
• Commands for calculation
• Manipulating strings
• Manipulating lists
• Array variables
• Dictionaries
• Global and uplevel references
• Introspection with the info command
• Pattern Matching
• Glob-style matching
• Regular expressions - background
• Using regular expressions to analyse text
• Details of regular expression syntax
• Grouping, capture and back-references
• Regexp substitution
• A significant example, analysing HDL source code
• Namespaces and Packages
• Functional decomposition
• Variables
• Namespace import and export
• Hierarchical namespaces
• Tcl libraries
• Autoloading
• Providing and using packages
• Packages and namespaces
• Modules
• Starkits
• TEApot