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Concept
Magic (software)
Summary
Magic is an electronic design automation (EDA) layout tool for very-large-scale integration (VLSI) integrated circuit (IC) originally written by John Ousterhout and his graduate students at UC Berkeley. Work began on the project in February 1983. A primitive version was operational by April 1983, when Joan Pendleton, Shing Kong and other graduate student chip designers suffered through many fast revisions devised to meet their needs in designing the SOAR CPU chip, a follow-on to Berkeley RISC.
Fearing that Ousterhout was going to propose another name that started with "C" to match his previous projects Cm*, Caesar, and Crystal, Gordon Hamachi proposed the name Magic because he liked the idea of being able to say that people used magic to design chips. The rest of the development team enthusiastically agreed to this proposal after he devised the backronym Manhattan Artwork Generator for Integrated Circuits. The Magic software developers called themselves magicians, while the chip designers were Magic users.
As free and open-source software, subject to the requirements of the BSD license, Magic continues to be popular because it is easy to use and easy to expand for specialized tasks.
The main difference between Magic and other VLSI design tools is its use of "corner-stitched" geometry, in which all layout is represented as a stack of planes, and each plane consists entirely of "tiles" (rectangles). The tiles must cover the entire plane. Each tile consists of an (X, Y) coordinate of its lower left-hand corner, and links to four tiles: the right-most neighbor on the top, the top-most neighbor on the right, the bottom-most neighbor on the left, and the left-most neighbor on the bottom. With the addition of the type of material represented by the tile, the layout geometry in the plane is exactly specified. The corner-stitched geometry representation leads to the concept of layout as "paint" to be applied to, or erased from, a canvas. This is considerably different from other tools that use the concept of layout as "objects" to be placed and manipulated separately from one another.
Official source
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