R
Roger Light
Guest
Hi,
I've been experimenting with ways of getting nice pictures of layouts
recently. My first attempt was to create a new display type "solid"
where all of the layers were made of solid colour rather than a pattern.
It worked nicely, but suffered because of the order of the layers - MET2
would obscure VIA1 for example and N/PPLUS would obscure DIFF.
So anyway, I've built up some skill code that runs on a layout cell view
and produces an SVG file of the visible layers which you can then open
in inkscape, the gimp or anything else that supports it. The results
look pretty good in my opinion.
Before you use it you need to create two files which tell the code which
layers to consider and which order they should appear in as well as
how they should appear. So in my case, I use top metal to cover lots of
circuitry, so I can make it slightly transparent so I can see what's
going on underneath (or I could make it non-visible in the LSW and it
wouldn't appear at all).
If you want to give it a try, you'll also have to edit the code slightly
to point it at where you have the files and where to dump the output.
One caveat - it leaves behind a library (by default this is layout2svg)
which it uses as a temporary library. Creating a library and then
deleting it again for each operation means your cds.lib would fill up
with multiple entries about the deletion, which is a bit impolite. It's
safe to delete the temporary library, or search for FIXME in the code
and enable the deletion if you're happy that it will produce excess
lines in your cds.lib.
It turned out quite large in the end and I'm a bit reluctant to post a
19k file here directly (especially after all that waffle), so I've put
it on the web at http://atchoo.org/tools/cadence/svg.il
Hope you find it useful - but don't expect it to work on large designs!
Cheers,
Roger
I've been experimenting with ways of getting nice pictures of layouts
recently. My first attempt was to create a new display type "solid"
where all of the layers were made of solid colour rather than a pattern.
It worked nicely, but suffered because of the order of the layers - MET2
would obscure VIA1 for example and N/PPLUS would obscure DIFF.
So anyway, I've built up some skill code that runs on a layout cell view
and produces an SVG file of the visible layers which you can then open
in inkscape, the gimp or anything else that supports it. The results
look pretty good in my opinion.
Before you use it you need to create two files which tell the code which
layers to consider and which order they should appear in as well as
how they should appear. So in my case, I use top metal to cover lots of
circuitry, so I can make it slightly transparent so I can see what's
going on underneath (or I could make it non-visible in the LSW and it
wouldn't appear at all).
If you want to give it a try, you'll also have to edit the code slightly
to point it at where you have the files and where to dump the output.
One caveat - it leaves behind a library (by default this is layout2svg)
which it uses as a temporary library. Creating a library and then
deleting it again for each operation means your cds.lib would fill up
with multiple entries about the deletion, which is a bit impolite. It's
safe to delete the temporary library, or search for FIXME in the code
and enable the deletion if you're happy that it will produce excess
lines in your cds.lib.
It turned out quite large in the end and I'm a bit reluctant to post a
19k file here directly (especially after all that waffle), so I've put
it on the web at http://atchoo.org/tools/cadence/svg.il
Hope you find it useful - but don't expect it to work on large designs!
Cheers,
Roger