Examples of User Interface

VOV is designed to be non-intrusive. It offers multiple equivalent interfaces:

Command line interface

All fundamental interactions with VOV can be performed from a normal UNIX shell. While there are several dozens of commands available to the expert user, all the "normal" designer needs to learn are three simple commands:

vls: Like ls, this command shows the files in this directory and their status in the context of the design. This is shown in the figure below.
vsT: Thic command shows the tools that have been executed in the current working directory;
vsR: Roughly equivalent to make, this command brings files and tools in the current directory up to date.

Menu driven interface

The menu driven interface is based on Tcl/Tk.

Graphical interface

The graphical interface is particularly useful for training, for the beginner user, and for documentation of the design flow. Green nodes are up-to-date. The blue nodes are not up-to-date, meaning that they depend on data or tools which have recently changed.

TCL interface

The most complex manipulation of the design trace can be performed programmatically with the TCL interface.

With the TCL interface, the design trace can be assembled and modified without executing any tool. In this way, designers can build a skeleton of a design trace and then ask VOV to complete all the details using run-time tracing.

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