A Batch File for Plotting Stream Files to TIFF

by Steve DiBartolomeo and Hagai Pettel
December 23, 2003


An Artwork customer recently asked us for advise on how to do the following:

  1. Unionize every layer of a GDSII file to remove overlaps
  2. plot each layer to a TIFF bitmap output
  3. each layer should have a solid fill but the outline should be a different color than the fill.

Two programs are needed to do this: QckBool to handle the unionization of the data within a layer and GDSPLOT to rasterize the layer and output a TIFF file.

Unionize Each Layer

This script is easy to write assuming that the user already knows:

  1. The GDSII File name
  2. The name of the top level structure
  3. the list of layers to unionize

Let's do a simple example where the name of the GDSII file is demo5.gds, the top level structure is named TOP, and the layers to process are: 1,2,3,4 and 5.

The script will be:


boolw32f.exe demo5.gds demo5_out.gds TOP 1;2;3;4;5 +1;+2;+3;+4;+5 +nclip:1,1 -union


where

boolw32f.exe            name of the Qckbool engine that will do the union operation

demo5.gds               the input GDSII file

demo5_out.gds           the output GDSII file after union

TOP                     the top level structure for demo5.gds

1;2;3;4;5               list of layers in the output file

+1;+2;+3;+4;+5          list of input layers and the union operation (+) 

+nclip:1,1              instructs bool32w to stripe the layout as needed for
                        max efficiency.

-union                  after striping to rebuild (by union) the cuts across
                        stripes.


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