Best way to find extents of database

Hi Everyone,

I've been trying to find a good way to calculate the bounding boxes for various layouts. This is the simplest and works well for small layouts:

allLayers = input("1-999/0-5")
puts "Bounding box of this layout is (x_ll,y_ll,x_ur,y_ur)"
puts allLayers.bbox.to_s

But this doesn't work for large layouts (it takes forever and doesn't indicate whether progress is being made)

One option I tried and haven't really gotten to work is to extract the layers in Python like this (after I used pip to install klayout):

from klayout import db
import sys,os

layout = db.Layout()
layout.read('test.gds')

for ly_id in layout.layer_indices():
lyList[ly_id] = layout.get_info(ly_id).to_s().split('/')

The issue here is that I don't know how to feed the layer list into BBOX.

This way would be preferential for me since I would like to do some other DRC manipulations on a layer-by-layer basis and this would get me halfway there.

Any help is appreciated!

Comments

  • This would be interesting to see fitted up to the other related
    boundary advice I received in this thread:

    https://www.klayout.de/forum/discussion/1423/boolean-operators#latest

    I would prefer to let the layout "declare its own size", as it were,
    rather than adding a boundary layer to the foundry's set or
    having to manually assert and size one in a customized run-set.

    It would also be nice to have DRC script print out what it
    thinks the extents are, for its run.

  • Hi rajan,

    The bounding box is a cell property, so the easiest way is this script:

    from klayout import db
    
    layout = db.Layout()
    layout.read('test.gds')
    
    print(str(layout.top_cell().dbbox()))
    

    This script should be fast - essentially it's just the read time.

    Within a DRC script you can use "extent" to give you the bounding box of all layers:

    source("test.gds")
    
    puts extent.data.bbox
    

    @Jim Of course, the best was if the layout could indicate it's dimensions. But GDS does not provide this information. A GDS file will only give you the layers, that's it. So having a boundary layer is the only way to embed the layout extension into GDS.

    There is one more reason to have a layer for the boundary. Sometimes, the boundary might not be a box. I know cases, where the corners of the chips are reserved for inspection alignment marks. In this case, the boundary is a box minus small corners. And inversion correctly avoids these corners if you implement it as "boundary - layer".

    Matthias

  • Thanks for the tips, the layout object is pretty feature-rich so I will have to play around with that more. The dbbox function is indeed very fast!

  • edited February 2020

    duplicate comment

  • How to see the boundary box size after running below scripts in DRC environment?

    source("test.gds")
    puts extent.data.bbox

  • You mean, where to see it?

    "puts" will print to the "console" which you find in the "macro IDE": Macros/Macro Development.

    You can also use "log", "info", "warning" or "error". This will go to the log file (if you specify one) or the log viewer (File/Log Viewer). "log" will be shown only in verbose mode. The other three are formatted according to the severity level (warnings blue, errors red, info black).

    Matthias

  • I've been using the "Compute the bounding box of a cell" script of the "Useful Ruby Modules" section for a long time now. Nice to have it as a menu entry if you have to check it frequently... Code is in the link below...

    https://www.klayout.org/svn-public/klayout-resources/trunk/scripts/cell_bbox.lym

    Cheers,

    Tomas

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