About The ProjectKLayout HighlightsGeneral
Viewer
Editor
KLayout is a GDS and OASIS file viewerAlthough a comparatively simple piece of software, a layout viewer is not only just a tool for the chip design engineer. Today design's complexity require not only a simple "viewer". Rather, a viewer is the microscope through which the engineer looks at the design. There are numerous viewers available, but sadly there are not many which satisfy a few basic requirements. Most of them are commercial and expensive. If there is need for a simple, yet powerful viewer - here it is. The main objective was to focus on the basic functionality but adding some useful features that many, even commercial viewers don't have. First rarely any tool allows to place two or even more layout files over each other. It often happens that you receive some layers in one file, the other layers in another. Some tools allow to load multiple layouts and switch between the windows. Well, this may help - but still the possibility of overlaying two layouts offers much more comfort. Sadly, almost no viewer is really precise. There is not much more annoying than a layout that changes when you zoom into it. Or placeholder shapes appearing at some zoom level and disappearing at the next, cell labels that cannot be caught because they jump around when you try to zoom them into view, and many other surprising ways or creative interpretation and optimization. This viewer shows the design as it is. Only some viewers allow to make layers "transparent". Only this way, a stack of layers can be visualized effectively. In addition, this viewer can animate layers to make them blink or scroll the fill pattern. Animation is a good tool to highlight certain layers. This viewer allows to display a layer "marked" by drawing a small cross on all shapes. There is not better way to visualize the distribution of a set of sparse error markers on a dense layout! All comes wrapped in a nice, Qt based state of the art GUI. Usage of the viewer is simple and is similar to that of other tools. KLayout is moreStarting with version 0.15, KLayout is also an editor that allows to change GDS and OASIS files and create them from scratch. See the release notes of version 0.15 and the editor mode quickstart manual for a more detailed description. KLayout also offers a Ruby-based scripting environment called "RBA" which allows to automate various tasks, mainly in the visualisation area but also for layout generation. See the introduction into the ruby based automation API for details about this feature. KLayout is freeThe viewer is published under GNU public license GPL (www.gnu.org) in compliance with the requirements for using the Qt open source licence. If may be copied and distributed freely. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of Merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Please use it AT YOUR OWN RISK. Current statusThe current version is 0.19. Although this low number reflects the early stage of development, the version is reasonably stable. KLayout currently builds on recent Linux installations, under Solaris and can be built on Windows using cygwin and mingw. For the precise requirements see below and the download and build page. For Windows, a package is provided that contains the executable and DLL's required. The issue list for version 0.19 can be found in the known bugs and issues list Currently there is no comprehensive documentation but I hope the user interface is intuitive enough to compensate this lack somewhat. However, there is a quick start manual available. Also for editor mode, a editor mode quickstart manual is provided. The build is performed by a simple wrapper shell script rather than some sophisticated configuration setup. Some options allow to configure the script somewhat. This is definitly the weak spot of the current release. I hope I will be able to obtain a more elaborate setup in the next release. The build requires the Qt4 GUI toolkit in the multithreaded version and a recent gcc version to build. If required, the Qt4 toolkit can be obtained from http://www.trolltech.com. Since the viewer is based on open platforms, I would expect that it also compiles on other platforms. The GUI abstraction through Qt even allows to compile it on Windows(tm) with only very minor code specializations. The future of the projectKLayout is a living project. The program is being used by people in their daily work already. As my time allows I will gradually enhance and extend the code. I personally like to add editing capabilities. However, this is a major step, but the basics are already set up in the current code. Please feel free to issue feature requests to the mail address listed in the contact page. I am eager to learn about use cases and potential new applications for this tool. |