Parasitic extraction in Klayout status and roadmap

confusus

Hi,

I have a few questions about parasitic (RC) extraction and appreciate any comments and guidance.

1. Does Klayout have capabilities to do R & C extraction to create an extracted netlist for NGSpice?
   (My research on the internet and KLayout forum suggests not.)
2. If not, what are folks doing right now to get an extracted netlist with parasitic after drawing their layout on KLayout? (My search on the internet suggests that Magic is the answer. Are there other options?)
3. What can I do to contribute to the process of getting klayout to create an extracted netlist with RC that can be run on NGSpice (e.g. integrating fastcap and fasthenry)? Any guidance/road map/suggestions will be very helpful.

Best regards,
Joanne

Matthias

Hi Joanne,

currently there is no RC extraction support in KLayout.

I considered a couple of times to start with that topic, but my resources are limited and eaten away by daily support topics, so there was not progress so far.

I feel that RC extraction is a vast topic. There is low end there is table based extraction (for use by digital circuits) and on the high end 3d simulations such as the ones the FastX tools can provide.

For both approaches, the first step is some kind of net partitioning - a net is essentially a nested chunk of metal with devices and pins attached at particular positions. This is information, KLayout can give you once the netlist is extracted. Beyond that I have no plan yet.

Generally speaking, a RCX tool should be able to take this information and produce parasitics annotation, e.g. SPEF. This and the original netlist should render a full parasitics-annotated netlist.

Matthias