PUNTO - Pcb Utilities (for) NeTlist Optimization

PUNTO is a perl script for transforming and optimizing PCB netlists. PUNTO is very useful when ECO are needed on an existing PCB layout.

What can PUNTO actually do?

PUNTO currently contains three functions: diff, sort, and fix:

sort sorts all the nets in a netlist, and all the nodes in each net, based on an alphabetical order. It also cleans up long lines and indents the netlist to make it more readable.
diff compares two netlists and reports which nets were added, which nets were removed, and which nets were modified. Modified nets are broken down at the node level. Each modified net has a description specifying which nodes were added and which nodes were removed.
fix This is by far the most important function in PUNTO. It compares two netlists, and generates a third netlist. The first netlist is the original netlist, and the second netlist is an ECO netlist. As a result, the fix mode will generate a new ECO netlist that will be electrically identical to the previous ECO netlist, except it may rename some of the nets. The new ECO netlist will resemble the original netlist as much as possible, reducing extra work from the PCB program accepting the ECO netlist.

Licensing

Punto is covered by the GPL license.

Downloading PUNTO

Punto is a simple Perl script. You can download it here. Unfortunately, due to Yahoo/Geocities limitations, I'm not allowed to hold Perl scripts on my homepage (probably a security measure), so the script is compressed by ZIP.

What's new?

24-Jan-2001

Finally had the time to see why people (all 3 of them) couldn't download the file. Next time I should be careful with uppercase/lowercase letters - the file was called Punto.zip but the web site looked for punto.zip . (BAD udi, BAD!)

2-Feb-2000

Megred the "fix" mode from a separate Perl script.
First public release.

30-Jan-2000

Added the PADS2000 netlist format.

29-Jan-2000

Added mentor netlist format.

25-Dec-1999

Created the PUNTO homepage!

Known bugs

No known bugs yet!.