Corner Rounding
In some applications, i.e. power devices, it is desirable to have round corners instead of sharp corners to limit the electrical field. Klayout now offers a convenient way to create such structures. The basic idea is to draw the structures with sharp, 90 degree corners and then "soften" the corners by rounding them to a given radius. The resulting polygons can then be written to GDS files, even though GDS does not have the concept of "soft" (or circular) geometries.
The interesting part is: the corner rounding function can be re-applied on such geometries on a polygon basic. That means, that even if such a modified polygons are saved to GDS or otherwise modified, the original geometry can be reconstructed and the corner radius can be changed. No special geometrical objects or special GDS annotation is required to achieve this. This requirement imposes some (probably weak) limitations:
- The number of points per corner must not be too small (currently at least 32 on the full circle)
- The original geometry must not exhibit sharp corners and the original segments must be at least twice the corner radius in length.
- The corner segments must be perceivable as such, i.e the angle between adjacent edges must be "nearly" 180 degree. This imposes some restrictions on the minimum length of such a segment and on the accuracy by which they can be expressed in database units. This boils down to a certain length limit in terms of database units.
The following screenshot illustrates the round corners function. As can be seen in this example, it is necessary to allow a different radius specification for "inner" and "outer" corners.
The corner rounding function operates on selected shapes. It can be found in the "Selection" submenu of the "Edit" menu. A dialog will open which allows specification of the radius values and the desired resolution. If the selected polygon already has rounded corners, the corner rounding will be removed and the original polygon reconstructed before the new corner rounding is applied. By specifying "0" for the radius, the original sharp corners will be recovered.