Hi, are there some reference books for studing skill language?

 Hi Zfeng,

I would recommend looking at the documentation as a starting place, "Cadence SKILL Language Reference" and the "Cadence SKILL Language User Guide".  Also there is a useful area on the Cadence Online Support website: Resources -> SKILL Information -> Custom IC Design SKILL Code Library - here there are several example SKILL scripts that can be downloaded one-by-on, or all at once in a single file.

I hope that this helps you get started.

Regards,

Lawrence.

 Hi Lawrence,

      Thanks for your abvice, I have downloaded these files, except the code library which you mentioned above, because I don't know how to get "Cadence License Server Host ID" from our server, i will be appreciate if you can share it with me, if you don't have the library, it's doesn't matter!

      I want to make sure if the cadence can read the binary file?

Regards,

zfeng

Hi Zfeng,

The code library cannot be sent to people without an support account, as far as I know. The license server hostid should be available from your adminstrator or professor (if a student).

SKILL can read binary files if it's a database it knows how to handle, for example, reading  a schematic or layout database, or reading a psf/sst2/psfxl simulation results database. If you're talking about general binary file reading support, then no, it doesn't have that. What kind of binary file are you trying to read?

Regards,

Andrew.

 Hi Andrew,

     yes, my supervisor will connectn you(cadence) later, I want to konw if we need to pay for downloading the skill code library? 

     and i'm talking about to read a picture(bmp or other file) , i can use c code to read the picture information, but i want to use the skill language to do it. is it possible to read the binary file from specified position(use "fseek") ?

So you're effectively asking the same question you asked previously in /forums/p/17422/1245328.aspx#1245328 . The answer is no. You can use functions to seek and tell around the file, but there aren't functions to read binary data from a file (there's only gets, lineread, and similar ASCII file access functions).

Regards,

Andrew.

 Hi Andrew,

     I opened a binary file(extension is .dat) using other tools and found that the first Byte store"11111111"=integer "255" , but when i use the skill function "getc" to read it, why the return value is "\377", i get confused. thanks for explaining this.

Regards,

zfeng

Hi Zfeng,

The reason why this happens is because it returns it as a string."\377" is saying that this is an octal character, corresponding to 3*64+7*8+7 = 255.

So you could do charToInt(concat(theChar)) and it would return 255.

However, I'm not sure whether it will work particularly effectively or efficiently - but you can always try!

Regards,

Andrew.

 Hi Andrew,

    Thanks for your advice, I have manged to read the binary file, and I also want to know how to write a binary use skill language with specify fomart.

Regards,

zfeng

 Zfeng,

The problem is that there's no putc function, and whilst the alternative is to use something like fprintf() to write to a file, these cannot handle the complete range of characters from 0 to 255. In particular 0 will not work because it's seen as the null terminator, and so an empty string will be written if you try doing fprintf(port "%c" intToChar(0)) for example.

As I said before, SKILL is not really geared up for handling binary files - but you may want to contact customer support and request that a putc() function be added - there's no enhancement request that I can see asking for that currently.

Regards,

Andrew.