Re: RES: How to merge pure layer nodes

[Ole Myren Rohne]

Hi Diego,

Sorry for my rather armchair-ish answer yesterday;  I'm not a developer of Electric, and my ideas might not be aligned with how such problems were meant to be solved. With that caveat here are a few thoughts:

Higher level solution:

It is easy to get distracted by a too low-level idea (merging geometries), perhaps by focusing on the primary problem (generate metal-layer passives) a solution already exists? Here are some suggestions, ordered by what I consider low-to-high level:

1) Is perhaps Tools -> Network -> Extract Current Cell exactly what you should be looking for?

2) Is it possible to have ASITIC export in a format that supports connectivity and wires?

3) Would it be even better to take the basic parameters (pitch, width, turns) from ASITIC and generate the geometry directly in Electric (again with a script)?

Scripting/extensions:

The low-level merge operation is apparently not available in the Electric GUI, but an Electric developer could easily implement it in Java, probably on top of the PolyMerge class (imagine Tools -> Geometry -> Merge Nodes). It might also be possible script it in Java/Bsh (or Python/Jython), to be run through Tools -> Languages. Myself I'm not much of a Java (or Python) developer, so for my own convenience I've added ABCL as another scripting/extension language. It also so happened that I had previously solved exactly your low-level problem, and I yielded to the temptation of showing off this solution. Unfortunately I don't know how to distribute my hack, eg as an Electric-plugin, and it might be too low level for general consumption anyway. So while my solution is not directly accessible to you, someone might be able to achieve the same with Bsh (or Jython).

Best wishes, Ole