Release Notes

Release Notes

[TOC]

Version 0.0

BETA release provides the basic frameworks and functionality that Tincr will provide. It includes the following features:

• TincrCAD Tcl library
• TincrIO Tcl library
• TincrTest unit testing framework
• Example CAD tools

It should be noted that this BETA release is only meant to provide a preview of Tincr's capabilities. It is by no means a finished product, and any of its components are subject to change. The following is a list of features that are not yet supported in this version of Tincr:

• Hierarchical designs: This functionality is currently being added. While some aspects of Tincr can operate correctly on hierarchical objects, others may not. A design can be flattened when it is synthesized using the -flatten_hierarchy full option when calling Vivado's synthesis tool (synth_design)
• Pre-generated Caches: Tincr requires some additional information that is not provided by Vivado. Currently, Tincr generates this information on the fly the first time a command is called that references it, per Vivado session. Tincr then caches this information for later use. This means some commands will take a long time (up to minutes) to run the first time they are called. A feature has been planned that will allow these caches to be pre-generated for each part that is supported by Vivado to avoid these long "warm up" times.
• Unit Testing on Non-Windows OSs: The unit testing suite currently only works on Windows machines. The tcltest unit testing framework launches multiple instances of Tcl interpreters during a testing run. Since Vivado's Tcl interpreter is not a standard Tcl 8.5 interpreter, an executable script needs to be created that parses the parameters coming from tcltest and reorganizes them into a format that Vivado can understand. A .bat script has been created that runs on Windows machines. A bash script will be released soon to run on Linux machines.
• Route-throughs in Tincr Checkpoints: Tincr checkpoints are used for exporting designs between Vivado and an external application. Vivado does not yet provide the functionality to completely constrain a route-through, so designs with these constructs are unsupported by this version of Tincr. There is a fix in the works that will allow the user to automatically replace all route-throughs with a cell that just passes a signal.