Nlview Widgets

Automatic Schematic Generation

Concept Engineering's Nlview® engine provides automatic generation of schematic diagrams for different levels of electronic circuits, including gate-level, RTL and block-level. Optional engines are available for the system-level (S-engine), for the transistor-level (T-engine), and for automotive and aerospace applications (E-engine). The schematic layout can be modified and controlled by human intervention and always optimized by algorithms. A fine granularity of user preferences can be mixed with machine computed "beauty" to get the best human readable diagrams. Interactive circuit exploration is supported by incremental schematic generation technology. Nlview provides a set of APIs and interfaces with a certain GUI environment.

On this page, please find below: Examples, Widget Family, and Good Reasons

Example Schematic Diagrams

The examples below show Nlview-generated schematic diagrams with comments; click on the cropped pictures to display the full view.

This simple schematic diagram shows a circuit on operator level with bused connectivity. The connectivity may come e.g. from elaborated Verilog. One way for doing that is using the third-party Verific parser and the VVDI-link that gives Nlview access to the Verific netlist database. The VVDI-link is part of Concept Engineering's Nlview software package.

This schematic diagram shows two highlighted paths and some timing values – as text labels – and some markers (that may have been computed by a third-party tool, e.g. a static timing analyzer). Text labels, markers and highlighting can quickly change without adjusting the schematic layout. However, Nlview can optionally adjust the schematic layout to avoid text overlapping or reuse free space whenever the text labels change in length. For this simple example the loading of the netlist and the generation of the schematic diagram takes about 8ms of CPU time on an old Intel Xeon and the Nlview data-base consumes about 100kB.

This schematic diagram shows two bused muxes with some non-trivial bus connectivity. The rippers are automatically created. The circuit (netlist) given for this example is defined on single-bit level with Nlview performing automatic net bundling from the connectivity (however, the IO port buses and the bus pins of the muxes are given to Nlview).

This incrementally generated schematic diagram shows only a part of the whole circuit: the dashed wires indicate nets or buses that connect more than what is currently displayed. In addition, this example uses a Nlview feature that displays constant values as labels at the pins (here with yellow background) rather than routing power/ground nets to those pins. This example comes from elaborated Verilog, actually from the OpenCores project Aquarius.

This schematic diagram shows two signal paths thru a hierarchical circuit. The different hierarchy blocks are colored differently illustrating some rendering features that Nlview provides, including drop shadow and a sandwich-style stacked appearance. The plus and minus buttons can be used to unfold and fold hierarchy blocks. Nlview can also provide incremental schematic navigation starting with the given diagram. For this example, the loading of the netlist and the generation of the schematic diagram takes about 15ms of CPU time and the Nlview data-base consumes about 80kB.

This schematic diagram is the data-path of the Aquarius OpenCores CPU. This example needs about 55ms for loading the netlist thru Nlview's API and about 220ms for the generation of the schematic diagram (on an old Intel Xeon). The Nlview data-base consumes about 2000kB.

Optional Engines

A Family of Nlview Widgets

Nlview interfaces with many different GUI development environments. Each GUI environment requires a different member of the Nlview Widget Family like e.g. NlviewQT for the Qt development environment. Each "family member" is available as a separate product in a separate distribution package. However, they all share exactly the same algorithms and identical APIs and only differ in the way they are tailored for a certain GUI system. Each Nlview product is a software component (available as linkable binary and header files) that is intended to be used as a GUI building block for the customer's application.

For a detailed list of supported hardware platforms, see our Platform Support page.

The Nlview Family consists of:

Good Reasons for Choosing Nlview

The Nlview schematic engines give software teams unparalleled reliability, flexibility and performance, so that they can realize GUIs for EDA applications with shorter design cycles, lower development and maintenance cost and with higher quality.

Build or Buy?

Automatic schematic generation and display capabilities are typically integrated into EDA applications such as logic synthesis, simulation, verification, emulation, test automation and physical design. Developing high quality and high performance schematic diagram generation and viewing technology for one of these applications is tedious and time-consuming. The EDA tool developers' leverage comes from focusing on their core competency, not from spending their precious resources developing schematic technology. Concept Engineering is totally focused on schematic generation and viewing technology The resources required by commercial and in-house CAD tool developers to create schematic technology of equal speed, quality, and capability are sufficiently high so that these companies welcome the opportunity to purchase ready-made schematic technology. With the Nlview Widgets software components, software teams can begin focusing on the important issue of their project – the application.

An Industry Standard

Today the Nlview Widgets family is the most robust and flexible schematic generation and viewing technology on the market. Concept Engineering's component-based solutions ensure that applications work reliably and that integrators get the highest level of control and customizability. With tens of thousands of installed EDA applications making use of Nlview Widgets, Concept Engineering clearly sets the industry standard for schematic generation and viewing.

Integrate Nlview into Customer Application

The production-proven API (Application Programming Interface) provides a simple set of commands, callbacks and configuration properties and makes it easy to exchange data and information with the application. Nlview Widget components are available for the most common GUI development environments and easily fit into most software development flows.

At a Glance