SKILL is a Lisp dialect used as a

scripting language A scripting language or script language is a programming language that is used to manipulate, customize, and automate the facilities of an existing system. Scripting languages are usually interpreted at runtime rather than compiled. A scripting ...

and

PCell PCell stands for parameterized cell, a concept used widely in the automated design of analog integrated circuits. A PCell represents a part or a component of the circuit whose structure is dependent on one or more parameters. Hence, it is a cell ...

(parameterized cells) description language used in many

EDA EDA or Eda may refer to: Computing * Electronic design automation * Enterprise Desktop Alliance, a computer technology consortium * Enterprise digital assistant * Estimation of distribution algorithm * Event-driven architecture * Exploratory ...

software suites by Cadence Design Systems. It was originally put forth in an

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

paper in 1990.

History

SKILL was originally based on a flavor of Lisp called

Franz Lisp In computer programming, Franz Lisp is a discontinued Lisp programming language system written at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, UCB) by Professor Richard Fateman and several students, based largely on Maclisp and distribu ...

created at

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...

by the students of Professor Richard J. Fateman. SKILL is not an acronym; it is a name. For trademark reasons Cadence prefers it be capitalized.

and all other flavors of LISP were eventually superseded by an

ANSI The American National Standards Institute (ANSI ) is a private non-profit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. The organi ...

standard for

Common Lisp Common Lisp (CL) is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ''ANSI INCITS 226-1994 (S20018)'' (formerly ''X3.226-1994 (R1999)''). The Common Lisp HyperSpec, a hyperlinked HTML version, has been derived fro ...

. Historically, SKILL was known as IL. SKILL was a library of IL functions. The name was originally an initialism for Silicon Compiler Interface Language (SCIL), pronounced "SKIL", which then morphed into "SKILL", a plain English word that was easier for everyone to remember. "IL" was just Interface Language. Although SKILL was used initially to describe the

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...

rather than the language, the snappier name stuck. The name "IL" remains a common file extension used for

SKILL A skill is the learned ability to act with determined results with good execution often within a given amount of time, energy, or both. Skills can often be divided into domain-general and domain-specific skills. For example, in the domain of wo ...

code designating that the code contained in the file has lisp-2 semantics. Another possible file extension is , designating that the content has lisp-1 semantics.

References

Academic: * G. Wood and H-F S. Law, "SKILL - An Interactive Procedural Design Environment," Proceedings of Custom Integrated Circuits Conference, 1986, pp. 544–547 * Quan Nguyen, "CAD Scripting Languages", "A collection of Perl, Ruby, Python, Tcl and SKILL Scripts". Published by RAMACAD INC. ,
A Sample from Google Books
* A Quick Tour of SKILL Programming with command-line examples of SKILL codes versus Perl, Ruby, Python & TCL (go to the end of the blog)

External links

Cadence Design Systems

Pill - Open-source implementation
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cadence Skill Scripting languages Lisp programming language family