Magic Tutorial #1: Getting Started

John Ousterhout

Computer Science Division

Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720

(Updated by others, too.)

This tutorial corresponds to Magic version 7.

1 What is Magic?
Magic is an interactive system for creating and modifying VLSI circuit layouts. With Magic, you
use a color graphics display and a mouse or graphics tablet to design basic cells and to combine
them hierarchically into large structures. Magic is different from other layout editors you may
have used. The most important difference is that Magic is more than just a color painting tool:
it understands quite a bit about the nature of circuits and uses this information to provide you
with additional operations. For example, Magic has built-in knowledge of layout rules; as you
are editing, it continuously checks for rule violations. Magic also knows about connectivity and
transistors, and contains a built-in hierarchical circuit extractor. Magic also has a plow operation
that you can use to stretch or compact cells. Lastly, Magic has routing tools that you can use to
make the global interconnections in your circuits.
Magic is based on the Mead-Conway style of design. This means that it uses simplified design
rules and circuit structures. The simplifications make it easier for you to design circuits and permit
Magic to provide powerful assistance that would not be possible otherwise. However, they result
in slightly less dense circuits than you could get with more complex rules and structures. For
example, Magic permits only Manhattan designs (those whose edges are vertical or horizontal).
Circuit designers tell us that our conservative design rules cost 5-10% in density. We think that the
density sacrifice is compensated for by reduced design time.

2 How to Get Help and Report Problems

There are several ways you can get help about Magic. If you are trying to learn about the system,
you should start off with the Magic tutorials, of which this is the first. Each tutorial introduces a

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September 26, 2001 Magic Tutorial #1: Getting Started

Magic Tutorial #1: Getting Started

Magic Tutorial #2: Basic Painting and Selection
Magic Tutorial #3: Advanced Painting (Wiring and Plowing)
Magic Tutorial #4: Cell Hierarchies
Magic Tutorial #5: Multiple Windows
Magic Tutorial #6: Design-Rule Checking
Magic Tutorial #7: Netlists and Routing
Magic Tutorial #8: Circuit Extraction
Magic Tutorial #9: Format Conversion for CIF and Calma
Magic Tutorial #10: The Interactive Route
Magic Tutorial #11: Using RSIM with Magic
Magic Maintainer’s Manual #1: Hints for System Maintainers
Magic Maintainer’s Manual #2: The Technology File
Magic Maintainer’s Manual #3: Display Styles, Color Maps, and Glyphs
Magic Maintainer’s Manual #4: Using Magic Under X Windows
Magic Technology Manual #1: NMOS
Magic Technology Manual #2: SCMOS

Table 1: The Magic tutorials, maintenance manuals, and technology manuals.

particular set of facilities in Magic. There is also a set of manuals intended for system maintainers.
These describe things like how to create new technologies. Finally, there is a set of technology
manuals. Each one of the technology manuals describes the features peculiar to a particular tech-
nology, such as layer names and design rules. Table 1 lists all of the Magic manuals. The tutorials
are designed to be read while you are running Magic, so that you can try out the new commands as
they are explained. You needn’t read all the tutorials at once; each tutorial lists the other tutorials
that you should read first.
The tutorials are not necessarily complete. Each one is designed to introduce a set of facilities,
but it doesn’t necessarily cover every possibility. The ultimate authority on how Magic works is the
reference manual, which is a standard Unix man page. The man page gives concise and complete
descriptions of all the Magic commands. Once you have a general idea how a command works,
the man page is probably easier to consult than the tutorial. However, the man page may not make
much sense until after you’ve read the tutorial.
A third way of getting help is available on-line through Magic itself. The :help command will
print out one line for each Magic command, giving the command’s syntax and an extremely brief
description of the command. This facility is useful if you’ve forgotten the name or exact syntax
of a command. After each screenful of help information, :help stops and prints “–More–”. If you
type a space, the next screenful of data will be output, and if you type q the rest of the output will
be skipped. If you’re interested in information about a particular subject, you can type

:help subject

This command will print out each command description that contains the subject string.
If you have a question or problem that can’t be answered with any of the above approaches,
you may contact the Magic authors by sending mail to magic@[Link].

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This will log your message in a file (so we can’t forget about it) and forward the message to the
Magic maintainers. Magic maintenance is a mostly volunteer effort, so when you report a bug
or ask a question, please be specific. Obviously, the more specific you are, the more likely we
can answer your question or reproduce the bug you found. We’ll tend to answer the specific bug
reports first, since they involve less time on our part. Try to describe the exact sequence of events
that led to the problem, what you expected to happen, and what actually happened. If possible,
find a small example that reproduces the problem and send us the relevant (small!) files so we can
make it happen here. Or best of all, send us a bug fix along with a small example of the problem.

3 Graphics Configuration
Magic can be run with different graphics hardware. The most common configuration is to run
Magic under X11 on a workstation. Another way to run Magic is under SunView on a Sun work-
station, or under OpenGL (in an X11 environment) on an SGI workstation or Linux box with ac-
celerated 3D video hardware and drivers. Legacy code exists supporting AED graphics terminals
and X10 (the forerunner of X11). The rest of this section concerns X11.
Before starting up magic, make sure that your DISPLAY variable is set correctly. If you are
running magic and your X server on the same machine, set it to unix:0:

setenv DISPLAY unix:0

The Magic window is an ordinary X window, and can be moved and resized using the window
manager.
For now, you can skip to the next major section: ”Running Magic”.

4 Advanced X Use
The X11 driver can read in window sizing and font preferences from your .Xdefaults file. The
following specifications are recognized:

[Link]: 1000x600+10+10
[Link]: 300x300+400+100
[Link]: helvetica8
[Link]: helvetica12
[Link]: helvetica18
[Link]: helvetica24

[Link] is the size and position of the initial window, while [Link] is the
size and position of subsequent windows. If these are left blank, you will be prompted to give the
window’s position and size. small, medium, large, and xlarge are various fonts magic uses for
labels. Some X11 servers read the .Xdefaults file only when you initially log in; you may have
to run xrdb -load ˜/.Xdefaults for the changes to take effect.
Under X11, Magic can run on a display of any depth for which there are colormap and dstyle
files. Monochrome, 4 bit, 6 bit, 7 bit, and 24 bit files for MOS are distributed in this release. You

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can explicitly specify how many planes Magic is to use by adding a suffix numeral between 1 and
7 to “XWIND” when used with Magic’s “-d” option. For example, “magic -d XWIND1” runs
magic on a monochrome display and “magic -d XWIND7” runs magic on a 7 plane display. If this
number is not specified, magic checks the depth of the display and picks the largest number in the
set f1, 4, 6, 7, 16, 24g that the display will support. Another way to force the display type is to set
an environment variable called MAGIC COLOR to one of the strings “8bit”, “16bit”, or “24bit”.
Linux note:
Magic’s “native” display (except when using the OpenGL interface) is the 8-bit PseudoColor vi-
sual type. 24-bit TrueColor visuals prevent Magic from allocating colors for bit-plane logical
operations, so the 24-bit interface is visually somewhat sub-par, requiring stipple patterns on all
metal layers, for instance. Under Linux, a few (commercial) X drivers will support 8-bit overlays
on top of 24-bit TrueColor when using 32-bit color. This is the ideal way to use magic, because
the colormap for the rest of the display is preserved when the cursor is inside the Magic window.
Otherwise, the X session may have to be started using “startx --bpp 8” to force it to use the
8-bit PseudoColor visual.
X11 remote usage note:
When running Magic remotely on an X terminal, the colormap allocation may differ for the local
machine compared to the remote machine. In some cases, this can cause the background of magic
to appear black, usually with a black-on-black cursor. This is known to be true of X11 drivers for
Windows (such as PC-XWare), due to the way the Windows 8-bit PseudoColor colormap is set
up. This behavior can be corrected by setting two environment variables on the remote machine as
follows:

setenv X COLORMAP BASE 128

setenv X COLORMAP DEFAULT 0

This causes Magic to avoid trying to allocate the first color in the colormap, which under
Windows is fixed as black.

5 Running Magic
From this point on, you should be sitting at a Magic workstation so you can experiment with the
program as you read the manuals. Starting up Magic is usually pretty simple. Just log in and, if
needed, start up your favorite window system. Then type the shell command

magic tut1

Tut1 is the name of a library cell that you will play with in this tutorial. At this point, several
colored rectangles should appear on the color display along with a white box and a cursor. A
message will be printed on the text display to tell you that tut1 isn’t writable (it’s in a read-only
library), and a “>” prompt should appear. If this has happened, then you can skip the rest of this
section (except for the note below) and go directly to Section 5.
Note: in the tutorials, when you see things printed in boldface, for example, magic tut1 from
above, they refer to things you type exactly, such as command names and file names. These are

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usually case sensitive (A is different from a). When you see things printed in italics, they refer to
classes of things you might type. Arguments in square brackets are optional. For example, a more
complete description of the shell command for Magic is

magic [file]

You could type any file name for file, and Magic would start editing that file. It turns out that
tut1 is just a file in Magic’s cell library. If you didn’t type a file name, Magic would load a new
blank cell.
If things didn’t happen as they should have when you tried to run Magic, any of several things
could be wrong. If a message of the form “magic: Command not found” appears on your screen
it is because the shell couldn’t find the Magic program. The most stable version of Magic is the
directory ˜cad/bin, and the newest public version is in ˜cad/new. You should make sure
that both these directories are in your shell path. Normally, ˜cad/new should appear before
˜cad/bin. If this sounds like gibberish, find a Unix hacker and have him or her explain to you
about paths. If worst comes to worst, you can invoke Magic by typing its full name:

˜cad/bin/magic tut1

Another possible problem is that Magic might not know what kind of display you are using.
To solve this, use magic’s -d flag:

magic -d display tut1

Display is usually the model number of the workstation you are using or the name of your window
system. Look in the manual page for a list of valid names, or just guess something. Magic will
print out the list of valid names if you guess wrong.
If you are using a graphics terminal (not a workstation), it is possible that Magic doesn’t know
which serial line to use. To learn how to fix this, read about the -g switch in the magic(1) manual
page. Also read the displays(5) manual page.

6 The Box and the Cursor

Two things, called the box and the cursor, are used to select things on the color display. As you
move the mouse, the cursor moves on the screen. The cursor starts out with a crosshair shape, but
you’ll see later that its shape changes as you work to provide feedback about what you’re doing.
The left and right mouse buttons are used to position the box. If you press the left mouse button
and then release it, the box will move so that its lower left corner is at the cursor position. If you
press and release the right mouse button, the upper right corner of the box will move to the cursor
position, but the lower left corner will not change. These two buttons are enough to position the
box anywhere on the screen. Try using the buttons to place the box around each of the colored
rectangles on the screen.
Sometimes it is convenient to move the box by a corner other than the lower left. To do this,
press the left mouse button and hold it down. The cursor shape changes to show you that you are
moving the box by its lower left corner:

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While holding the button down, move the cursor near the lower right corner of the box, and now
click the right mouse button (i.e. press and release it, while still holding down the left button). The
cursor’s shape will change to indicate that you are now moving the box by its lower right corner.
Move the cursor to a different place on the screen and release the left button. The box should move
so that its lower right corner is at the cursor position. Try using this feature to move the box so that
it is almost entirely off-screen to the left. Try moving the box by each of its corners.
You can also reshape the box by corners other than the upper right. To do this, press the right
mouse button and hold it down. The cursor shape shows you that you are reshaping the box by its
upper right corner:

Now move the cursor near some other corner of the box and click the left button, all the while
holding the right button down. The cursor shape will change to show you that now you are reshap-
ing the box by a different corner. When you release the right button, the box will reshape so that
the selected corner is at the cursor position but the diagonally opposite corner is unchanged. Try
reshaping the box by each of its corners.

7 Invoking Commands
Commands can be invoked in Magic in three ways: by pressing buttons on the mouse; by typing
single keystrokes on the text keyboard (these are called macros); or by typing longer commands
on the text keyboard (these are called long commands). Many of the commands use the box and
cursor to help guide the command.
To see how commands can be invoked from the buttons, first position the box over a small
blank area in the middle of the screen. Then move the cursor over the red rectangle and press the
middle mouse button. At this point, the area of the box should get painted red. Now move the
cursor over empty space and press the middle button again. The red paint should go away. Note
how this command uses both the cursor and box locations to control what happens.
As an example of a macro, type the g key on the text keyboard. A grid will appear on the color
display, along with a small black box marking the origin of the cell. If you type g again, the grid
will go away. You may have noticed earlier that the box corners didn’t move to the exact cursor
position: you can see now that the box is forced to fall on grid points.
Long commands are invoked by typing a colon (“:”) or semi-colon (“;”). After you type the
colon or semi-colon, the “>” prompt on the text screen will be replaced by a “:” prompt. This
indicates that Magic is waiting for a long command. At this point you should type a line of text,
followed by a return. When the long command has been processed, the “>” prompt reappears on
the text display. Try typing semi-colon followed by return to see how this works. Occasionally a
“]” (right bracket) prompt will appear. This means that the design-rule checker is reverifying part
of your design. For now you can just ignore this and treat “]” like “>”.
Each long command consists of the name of the command followed by arguments, if any are
needed by that command. The command name can be abbreviated, just as long as you type enough
characters to distinguish it from all other long commands. For example, :h and :he may be used

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as abbreviations for :help. On the other hand, :u may not be used as an abbreviation for :undo
because there is another command, :upsidedown, that has the same abbreviation. Try typing :u.
As an example of a long command, put the box over empty space on the color display, then
invoke the long command

:paint red

The box should fill with the red color, just as if you had used the middle mouse button to paint
it. Everything you can do in Magic can be invoked with a long command. It turns out that the
macros are just conveniences that are expanded into long commands and executed. For example,
the long command equivalent to the g macro is

:grid

Magic permits you to define new macros if you wish. Once you’ve become familiar with Magic
you’ll almost certainly want to add your own macros so that you can invoke quickly the commands
you use most frequently. See the magic(1) man page under the command :macro.
One more long command is of immediate use to you. It is

:quit

Invoke this command. Note that before exiting, Magic will give you one last chance to save the
information that you’ve modified. Type y to exit without saving anything.

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