Verilog netlist as an exchange language

Recently, difficulties in exchanging a Verilog HDL netlist between two different vendor tools have been observed. Many are trying to overcome some of the difficult issues by using an ad hoc approach. Most of the time a designer has to hand edit or write scripts or even hire an outside consultant to resolve these issues. Some of these approaches, however, may be time consuming, and this can lead to a loss of designers' productivity. The authors present some of the problems that they noticed, and suggest possible solutions. They present these in the context of translating a Verilog HDL netlist to AT&T's internal design database, called DDB, and vice versa. A subset of the Verilog language that is extracted to do the netlist translation is also presented.<>