I'm experimenting with exporting spice from xschem and then into magic. Is there an xschem component I can use that will create port pins in magic? Right now I'm having to create all the ports manually in magic

@Matt Venn xschem generates metadata in the netlist (in the form of commented lines) to indicate all nets that have an input, output or inout port:

**.subckt bandgap START CLK EN_N VBG VCC VSS
*.ipin EN_N
*.opin VBG
*.ipin VCC
*.ipin VSS
*.ipin CLK
*.ipin START

or the CDL syntax (In LVS mode) :

.subckt bandgap START CLK EN_N VBG VCC VSS
*.PININFO EN_N:I VBG:O VCC:I VSS:I CLK:I START:I

In the above

:I

means input,

:O

means output and

:B

means inout. I think this information could be used easily. If there is a need for a different syntax it is easy to change.

@Stefan Schippers (@Matt Venn): If the ".subckt" line is included in the netlist, then the pin names will automatically be turned into ports in magic when the netlist is imported. I could add handling of the metadata in xschem or CDL to annotate the port with the direction, because otherwise that has to be done manually before writing LEF.

ok, so I need to set that option for LVS as we discussed recently, then it should happen