Pause and IPC in SKILL

[Emil Hjalmarson]

Hi,

I would like my SKILL program to halt for a few seconds while I wait for
a MATLAB program to write some data to a file that are to be accessed by
the SKILL script. Currently I solve the task by letting the SKILL script
try to access the file continuously while the MATLAB program executes.
However, this is a dirty solution and it steals a lot of CPU time so
there must be some better solution. Any suggestions?

I also have a more general question. Is there a better way, than using
temporary files, to pass data between MATLAB and SKILL? I have looked
briefly at IPC in the manual. However, since the SKILL script is the
slave process I would like MATLAB to be in control of things I do not
want to start MATLAB as a child process to the SKILL script. Is there
some way to "hook-up" with a process that is already running?

Best regards,
Emil Hjalmarson

 

[Jean-Marc Bourguet]

Emil Hjalmarson <emilh@isy.liu.se> writes:

I would like my SKILL program to halt for a few seconds while I wait
for a MATLAB program to write some data to a file that are to be
accessed by the SKILL script. Currently I solve the task by letting
the SKILL script try to access the file continuously while the
MATLAB program executes. However, this is a dirty solution and it
steals a lot of CPU time so there must be some better solution. Any
suggestions?

A possibility: make skill read a named pipe and MATLAB write to it.

Yours,

--
Jean-Marc

 

[Doug]

Emil Hjalmarson wrote:

Hi,

I would like my SKILL program to halt for a few seconds while I wait for
a MATLAB program to write some data to a file that are to be accessed by
the SKILL script. Currently I solve the task by letting the SKILL script
try to access the file continuously while the MATLAB program executes.
However, this is a dirty solution and it steals a lot of CPU time so
there must be some better solution. Any suggestions?

You could use sleep(), but that freezes up the tools

You could try writing a program which is just a pause, then using
ipcBeginProcess and ipcWait to halt your skill code, I'm not sure if
that would work though.

In the past I have used a C program launched with ipcSkillProcess to
periodically run a skill command, but I don't think that would be useful
here.

I also have a more general question. Is there a better way, than using
temporary files, to pass data between MATLAB and SKILL? I have looked
briefly at IPC in the manual. However, since the SKILL script is the
slave process I would like MATLAB to be in control of things I do not
want to start MATLAB as a child process to the SKILL script. Is there
some way to "hook-up" with a process that is already running?

You could try looking at a previous posting
(http://groups.google.com/group/comp.cad.cadence/browse_thread/thread/4327bb077f9241b3/131e35149650fa90?q=simvision&rnum=1#131e35149650fa90)
Andrew's code there might be of use, if you can somehow implement the
tcl bits in MATLAB. I'm unsure whether it would be worth the effort though.

Hope this helps

Doug

 

[Andrew Beckett]

On Mon, 08 Aug 2005 15:43:50 +0100, Doug <douglad3@cs.man.ac.uk> wrote:

You could try looking at a previous posting
(http://groups.google.com/group/comp.cad.cadence/browse_thread/thread/4327bb077f9241b3/131e35149650fa90?q=simvision&rnum=1#131e35149650fa90)
Andrew's code there might be of use, if you can somehow implement the
tcl bits in MATLAB. I'm unsure whether it would be worth the effort though.

Hope this helps

Doug

I was just about to post exactly the same thing!

You could of course use the Tcl code, and then fire off something from Matlab
which calls the skillClient command - so that would minimise the amount of
rewriting for Matlab - but it's a bit messy with extra scripts in the way.

Regards,

Andrew.