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Here are some of the Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tools that
I've developed for integrated circuit design at Bell Labs.
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Panorama is a plotting tool for radio frequency (RF)
applications in analog circuit design. This tool creates
Harmonic Balance graphs and Smith charts used in RF analysis.
Signals are loaded into the main window and selected from
a spread-sheet style display. Signals can be plotted in a
new window or added to an existing window via drag-and-drop
operations. Users can interactively zoom, pan, and identify
data points within a plotting window.
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Celerity is a state-of-the-art simulator for analog circuit design.
Typical simulations are run in batch mode and may take
hours--or even days--to execute. I developed this tool to
display the current status of a job. At any point, users can
start the tool, connect to an existing job, and determine
exactly how far it has progressed. They can look for errors
in input files and see plots of outputs as they're being
generated (so-called "marching waveforms").
This example shows a DC operating point (".dc op")
being run as part of a transient simulation (".tr")
within a loop (".loop"). The error is decreasing,
so the DC operating point has almost converged. Clicking on
.tr or .loop brings up a status bar
showing how far that part of the simulation has progressed.
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SEQUAL is a simulator for ballistic quantum transport in
semiconductor heterostructures. I developed this simulator
while in graduate school at Purdue, and I created a graphical
interface for it at Bell Labs.
The window in the lower-left corner lets you build up a
description of a device as a stack of material layers. The
device shown has two AlGaAs layers (shown in dark blue) that act
as tunneling barriers for electrons. The window on the right
shows the conduction band profile of this device under bias.
Red lines indicate resonant energies where the transmission
of electrons is enhanced. The window in back shows a plot
of transmission as a function of energy, along with the printed
output from the simulator.
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TCLP is a 2D interconnect capacitance simulator for integrated
circuit design. Users can "sketch" the material layers and
metal runners in a cross-section of their circuit. Capacitance
values are queried by clicking and dragging between any two
runners.
TCLP has an interactive command language. Users can attach
dimension arrows to their drawing and manipulate sizes by
setting Tcl variables. Users can also attach meters to measure
capacitance values between runners. In this snapshot,
the user has looped through several values of a dimension
h0, and has printed the capacitance value in
the meter c0, in this case measuring the capacitance
to ground.
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I developed the following extensions while working on various
Tcl/Tk applications. These extensions are written in C language
and linked into the wish executable.
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[incr Tcl] is an
object-oriented extension of the
Tcl
programming language. I started working on it in 1992
as my own Tcl/Tk code was getting out of hand. By itself,
Tcl is a great language for small scripts, with less than
5,000 lines of code. Beyond that, the mess of procedures
and global variables makes code difficult to maintain.
[incr Tcl] was invented to augment Tcl in the same way
that C++ augments C. It provides a way to group related
procedures and their associated data into a class definition.
This helps programmers organize their code into modules,
making it easier to maintain.
[incr Tcl] is currently used by thousands of developers
worldwide, and it has been incorporated into dozens of
interesting applications.
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The Cipher extension supports encrypted scripts for Tcl/Tk.
I developed this extension when my management expressed
concern about releasing "source code" for our Tcl/Tk projects.
Instead of shipping Tcl/Tk scripts in plain text form, we can
encrypt them, making it harder for competitors to steal our
code.
The Cipher extension has three commands. cipher encode
creates an encrypted version of an ASCII file.
cipher decode returns the contents of an encrypted
file. And cipher source executes an encrypted file.
As shown in the snapshot, hello.cph is an encrypted
file. Humans have trouble reading it, but Tcl has no problem
executing it via cipher source.
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I'm coauthor of the
Effective Tcl/Tk Programming book published by
Addison-Wesley, and I
contributed 2 chapters to the
Tcl/Tk Tools book published by
O'Reilly & Associates.
I've developed the following applications in conjunction with
these books and some other
training courses
that I've written.
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The Electric Secretary is a daily calendar and appointment manager.
I developed it as an example client/server application for the
Effective Tcl/Tk Programming book.
When the client program (shown here) starts up, it opens a socket
to the server and downloads appointments for the current user.
Days with appointments are marked with a small pencil icon on
the calendar. Clicking on a particular date brings up a list
of appointments in a Tk text widget. The appointments can be
edited and stored back on the server.
The client/server architecture turns this simple calendar into
a powerful groupware application. Clients can look for scheduling
conflicts among a group of users on the server. If an empty slot
is found, an appointment can be added and broadcast to the other
users in the group.
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The CoffeeShop is a debugging environment for the lab exercises
in a training course that I developed. The course, entitled
Object-Oriented Programming with [incr Tcl],
teaches how to use an
object-oriented extension
that I developed for the
Tcl
programming language. During the lab exercises, students develop
a base class CoffeeMaker,
a derived class AutoCoffeeMaker,
and separate Coffee objects.
Before the CoffeeShop was developed, students would test their
code by typing in commands to create objects and invoke their
methods. The CoffeeShop provides the same interactive command
line, but adds graphics and a whole lot of fun! When each object
is created, a graphical representation pops up. Each object has
a picture, some buttons to invoke its methods, and some gauges
to monitor its internal state. Students can watch attributes
such as Temperature and Quality
fluctuate as a function of time, as the coffee loses its freshness.
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Robot Programming Environment
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I built this robot application the weekend before a recent
Take Our Daughters To Work day. I had to teach
the fundamentals of programming to a roomfull of teenage girls.
I gave them a robot that would understand some basic
commands (forward, backward,
left, right, and so forth) and
had them navigate the robot through a room full of obstacles
to reach the Mountain Dew bottle. They could type the commands
into the text area or click on the shortcuts along the left
side of the window. As they ran their program, they could
see each line of their program highlighted, and they could
watch the robot move about as each line was executed. All
the while, they learned about program flow, procedures and
conditional statements.
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I developed this drawing editor for the
Effective Tcl/Tk Programming book to show off various features
of the Tk canvas. The tool bar on the left contains tools for
selecting items, drawing rectangles, ovals, and splines, and
adding text annotations. In this snapshot, the selection tool
is active and an animated border of "marching ants" encompasses
the items currently selected.
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Catalog for Effective Tcl/Tk Programming
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The
Effective Tcl/Tk Programming book comes with a library
of code examples that readers can use to develop their
own applications.
I wanted to make it easy for readers to browse through
the examples and try them out. So I built this little
catalog program.
On the left, the catalog has a hierarchical
list of examples. Selecting an example brings up a
description with a Run Demo... button. Clicking
on the button brings up a separate, demo program.
Clicking on the Demo Code tab brings up the
code for the demo. Clicking on the Library Code
tab brings up the library code discussed in the book.
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I built this Solitaire card game for an introductory Tcl/Tk
course entitled
Building Applications with Tcl/Tk. I wanted to show
students that you can create production-quality applications
like Solitaire with Tcl/Tk. This game has an animated timer,
keeps track of good scores, and even has a "hint" mode that
marks the cards that can be played in a light green color--all
in less than 1000 lines of code!
I've made this Solitaire game available on the Web. If you have the
Tcl/Tk Plug-in for Netscape or Internet Explorer, you can
play Solitaire right in your Web browser.
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I use this checkers game to teach client/server programming
techniques in my
Effective Tcl/Tk Programming course. Students build this
game themselves during a series of lab exercises on the
first day of the course. They start by writing the code to
draw the checkerboard on a canvas. Then, they draw ovals for
the checkers and add bindings to support movement on the board.
Next, they interface the checkerboard to a text-based checkers
game via a bidirectional pipe. Finally, they replace the pipe
with a socket connection to a checkers server. The result is a
groupware checkers program; one player moves a checker on his
board, and the other player sees the move on the other board.
Players can send messages back and forth via a "chat" area
below their board.
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I built this simple text editor as an example for my course
Object-Oriented Programming with [incr Tcl]. It's
a fairly simple editor with the limited set of EMACS
editing commands that are built into the Tk text widget.
It has a split screen feature that lets you bring up several
files at once and adjust their relative area on the screen.
It will never replace a full-featured editor such as EMACS.
But the interesting thing about this editor is that it was
written in a few hours with less than 200 lines of code!
Viva [incr Widgets]!
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Tcl/Tk Consortium Web Site
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I created these applets for the
Tcl/Tk Consortium.
These applications have a client/server architecture--each applet
communicates with a data server running on the Consortium's home
machine.
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This calendar displays release dates and other important
events for the Tcl/Tk development community. When the applet
starts up, it connects to a server and downloads the list
of special events. Dates with an event are highlighted in
red. Clicking on a date brings up a description of the events
on that day.
Another applet is used to add appointments to the calendar; however,
access to this applet is carefully guarded.
If you have the
Tcl/Tk Plug-in for Netscape or Internet Explorer, you can
try the calendar for yourself.
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At the Tcl/Tk conference each year,
John Ousterhout polls the audience to determine new
directions for Tcl/Tk development. This session has come
to be known as "Ouster Voting." I developed this set of
applets to support "Ouster Voting" among member companies
on the Tcl/Tk Consortium Web site.
One applet is used to create new "Ouster Voting" surveys.
Questions are added to a survey one at a time. In the current snapshot,
the question "What platforms do you support?" is being added
to the survey in the window on the left. Once a survey has
been created and published, users from all over the Internet
can respond, and their responses are tallied on the Consortium
site. The window on the right shows an example of simulated
responses, with bar graphs displaying numerical results and
a listbox summarizing the write-in values.
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We're getting a lot of applications from companies that want
to join the Tcl/Tk Consortium--so many that we were having
trouble keeping track of them! So I built this little membership
database. When the applet starts up, it connects to a server
and downloads membership data. Records can be added or modified
and sent back to the server for storage. The server is written
in Tcl and stores the data in a gdbm database.
Now, the officers of the Consortium can access the database
from anywhere on the Internet and follow up on membership
requests.
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I wrote these programs just for the fun of it.
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I was asked to provide the entertainment after dinner at the
5th Annual Tcl/Tk Workshop in Boston. I couldn't
stand the thought of giving a talk and putting everyone to
sleep, so I used software to build my escape. I spent the
weekend before the workshop putting together this board
for a customized Jeopardy game, complete with music and
sound effects from the popular TV show. I brought it to
the workshop, and after the dinner, I plugged my laptop into
an overhead projector. I chose people at random from the
audience, and they answered Tcl/Tk questions from the
various categories on the board. Correct answers earned
them prizes such as books, t-shirts, frisbees and playing
cards.
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A few years ago, I started offering
training courses on Tcl/Tk. These courses have become
quite popular, and early on I found myself spending a lot
of time on the phone, registering people for the course.
So I built this program to take over that responsibility.
The Registrar is an automated system for handling course
registrations. Students can register for a course by using an
online form or by sending a form via e-mail. In either
case, their registration is automatically added to a database.
If space is available, their registration is accepted, and
they are sent details about the location and starting time
for the class; otherwise, they are placed on a waiting list
and notified that the class is full. The Registrar has been
online for 3 years now and has saved me countless headaches.
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A friend of mine read an article about a flashcard system
that was supposed to accelerate learning. In theory, you
can commit bits of knowledge to your long-term memory if you
see them repeatedly at certain intervals. The flashcard
system provided a way to cycle through the cards and see
the information at the proper intervals. Anyway, my friend
wanted to use this system to learn French. He downloaded
a French dictionary from the Internet, and I built this
application for managing the cards.
In this snapshot, one of the cards is exposed. The user
didn't know the word, so the program is showing its meaning
in a pop-up window. This card will appear again and again
until it becomes a permanent fixture in the user's memory.
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