One of Pierre’s favourite “toy” has always been Perl. Perl is a widely used language which is extremely efficient, in other things, to parse various type of data. Perl’s addition of Tk makes it a good tool to create useful Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). Pierre has used Perl and Perl/Tk for various applications. It would be tedious to describe all of the applications were these scripts were used and developed. It should suffice to say that when Pierre sees a process which can be speed up and/or when its quality can be improved, then he would write a script for it.

Here are some examples:

• Top level modules stitching (creation of a netlist).
• Generation of arrays of registers (RTL code).
• Generation of various length FIR filters (RTL code).
• Comparison of large lists of I/O in RTL modules with the I/O list in the documentation.
• Creation of a various GUI to ensure that the whole team use the same options of a specific tools (simulation and design environment).
• Creation of an assembler for a small DSP processor.
• Scripts to help extract specific power information from large data files.
• Scripts to parse simulation log files for various purposes.

Pierre has also used TCL as a scripting language and he is also familiar with C-code.