XOR vs DIFF tool

edited March 2019 in KLayout Support
Hello,

I have executed both tools into the subject on 2 different gds file and I have received the same results.
Can You explain the main difference between these tools?

Many thanks in advance

      Luciano

Comments

  • Hi Luciano,

    It's good you got the same result :-)

    The diff tool is a "semantic" tool while "XOR" is purely geometry. "diff" takes the shapes and compares one to one. For example, if two rectangles form an "L" and in the other layout there is a single polygon with the same resulting shape, the diff tool will report this as different (two shapes) while the XOR reports this as identical.

    The diff tool also tries to do some cell mapping in a hierarchical layout. So basically it can detect if a cell was just renamed if the cell is still in the same position, but with a different name. It also does a cellwise compare, so it may be faster because a cell needs to be compare once while the XOR checks every position.

    Plus the diff can compare text objects. The XOR can't because a text is not something with an "area".

    Matthias

  • Thanks You Matthias for the explanation.

    Luciano
    
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