2cli - Agent-friendly CLI interface for EDA tools with interactive shell

Overview

Many popular commercial EDA (Electronic Design Automation) tools provide an interactive shell for accepting engineers' commands. However, these interactive shells may not easily integrate with modern AI agents' MCP or CLI interfaces.

2cli is a freeware developed by DashThru Technology. It provides a simple CLI interface that allows AI agents to effortlessly manipulate EDA tools through their interactive shells. In addition to sending commands, 2cli also features optimized tab completion and man page mode control, both of which are widely used in commercial EDA tools.

Launching an EDA tool with 2cli

Use 2cli -start to launch an EDA tool. For example:

2cli -start dashrtl -no_gui

or

2cli -start 'dashrtl -no_gui'

This starts the DashRTL tool and prints its PID upon success.

Manipulating the interactive shell of an EDA tool

Use 2cli followed by a command and options to send text to the EDA tool. For example:

2cli puts hello

or

2cli 'puts hello'

This sends a print command to the Tcl shell of the EDA tool. 2cli also supports tab completion:

2cli 'get\t'

This prints all Tcl commands starting with get in the launched EDA tool. Many EDA tools may enter page mode after receiving a man command. 2cli handles page mode correctly and will not get stuck on these commands:

2cli man get_cells

This prints detailed information for get_cells command, which exists in many EDA tools.