When describing circuits to computers, have you ever felt that the languages for EDA, be it SPICE or Verilog or whatever are not flexible enough ? Well, I have. Coding regular structures such as adders, ring oscillators, multipliers etc. with popular languages in EDA can be a pain. A couple of weeks ago, I was checking out a synthesized ring oscillator to build a time-to-digital converter (TDC) [1]. Building long chains of inverters by hand is drudgery and SPICE does precious little to help in automation. At first, I tried writing a python program with string manipulations that generates verilog code, but quickly came to realize that its way more natural to have snippets of python inside verilog. Now, that needs a bit of work to get going. Thankfully, web developers solved this problem long ago for programmatically generating HTML. I used web.py 's templating engine to write verilog code that describes a ring oscillator (in case you are surprised by the fact that I used verilog rather than SPICE, the whole idea is to create the TDC with standard cells).
