September 30, 2002
Group Unveils 'OASIS' IC
Data Format
to Replace GDSII
By Semiconductor Business News |
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Group Unveils 'OASIS' IC
Data Format
to Replace GDSII
MONTEREY -- Hoping to lower the soaring costs
of photomasks in chip production, a group of
EDA, IC and chip-equipment vendors today unveiled
a new data interchange format that replaces
the venerable GDSII standard.
The group of companies--called the SEMI Integrated
Circuit (IC) Design/Photomask Data Path Task
Force--rolled out version 1.0 of the new, so-called
“Oasis” data base interchange format.
The group plans to offer the “Oasis”
format for all mask production functions as
a replacement to the current standard format--GDSII.
For more than 25 years, the GDS-II has been
the industry standard in the semiconductor industry.
GDS-II is a geometric data representation of
device design data.
The new “Oasis” format was developed
over the past year by a consortium of 21 leading
companies involved in IC design, design automation,
photomask patterning and photomask inspection.
The format is said to handle 64-bit design data
and data compaction 10 to 50 times greater than
GDS-II. It is designed for extensibility and
efficiency of data transfer throughout the design,
data processing, mask patterning and inspection
processes.
"We believe that the data volume explosion
taking place through the 0.18- and 0.13- micron
process generations is only going to get worse
as the industry moves to smaller process nodes,"
said Tom Grebinski, the Data Path Task Force
chairman, in a statement. "Our current
results show that the new stream format presents
an effective approach to mitigating this problem,
if it is adopted uniformly across the design
and mask manufacturing supply chain," he
said.
"GDSII is not broken, but has some obvious
outdated data representation inefficiencies
that need to be changed and that will help mitigate
this dramatic and sudden increase in design
and manufacturing data volume," Grebinski
said. "The data volume of design and manufacturing
will continue to increase."
"The new format maintains the important
capabilities of GDSII Stream, but has been fully
extended to handle 64-bit design data, and has
been made much more bit efficient, for both
hierarchical and flat layout data," said
Kurt Wampler, chairman of the SEMI Data Path
Task Force's New Stream Format Working Group,
and Distinguished Engineer, ASML MaskTools,
in a statement.
The new data format being introduced today is
subject to the approval as a standard by the
SEMI Worldwide Microlithography Committee. Sixty
percent of all companies on the Committee need
to submit a vote and all negative votes need
to be resolved as having no merit or the negative
vote withdrawn. Each company represents one
vote.
The Data Path Task Force consists of more than70
individuals, representing nearly 30 companies
and consortia from the integrated circuit design,
design automation, photomask manufacturing,
photomask pattern generation, and photomask
inspection industries.
