align cell from existing layout

azmaolier

Hi everyone,

I am just a new starter with klayout and want to ask a question here.

I imported a gds file and want to enlarge one kind of cell and decrease the number of these cells since the mask area is fixed. However, if I just simply did so, some overlap happened between adjecent cells.If I made cell variants then manually change the cell size and position (I deleted all of them but left one then make an 2 dimension array), the gds file grew from 35k bytes to 13M bytes. I feel there may be something wrong. I am wondering if we can define the cell number and displacement from somewhere to let it fit the whole mask layout area?

Thank you in advance.

Michael

Matthias

Hi Michael,

from your description I guess the array of cells got expanded into many identical cells. This can happen if you select all shapes from the array and create variants - KLayout will assume you want to edit every individual instance and create a new cell for every instance and put this cell in place of the original one (that is the meaning of a variant). In that case you will find many new top cells which blow up your file.

The procedure I would propose is to delete the array instance (reduce the hierarchy depth so you see the boxes of the cells and select the array. Then delete it). This will not delete the cell itself, but just the instance of it. Select the tile cell in the cell list (middle mouse click or "Show as new top" from the context menu) and manipulate it so it fits your needs. Then switch back to the previous cell and instantiate the cell again, this time with the new row and column counts and vectors.

Matthias