OASIS File Format Support Rises
as Translators Roll
Santa Cruz, Calif.
- Time to say goodbye to the venerable GDSII layout
format? Perhaps. The Oasis file format, which claims to be 10 to 50
times more compact than GDSII, is gaining broader support from leading
EDA tools vendors, with two smaller suppliers having announced new
Oasis translation tools.
Oasis Tooling Inc. and MicroEDA Corp.
each announced OpenAccess-to-Oasis translators last week. Mentor
Graphics Corp., which already offers a GDSII-to-Oasis translator, is
adding direct Oasis access to its Calibre tools and is working on its
own OpenAccess-to-Oasis translator. Cadence Design Systems Inc. will
support Oasis through the OpenAccess translator that Mentor is
developing. And Synopsys Inc. is pledging Oasis support with all of its
IC physical design and design-for-manufacturing tools, using a
homegrown applications programming interface.
The activity amounts to fairly rapid
implementation for a standard that was approved for use in mid-2003 by
Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International (SEMI). But the
need for a newer file format is great, given the huge files required by
nanometer IC designs.
"The transition from design to the
mask shop is getting ugly," said Joe Sawicki, vice president and
general manager of Mentor's Design to Silicon Division. "People are
having to ship 200-Gbyte layers. When you have to ship 32 layers to
make up the chip, that's a nightmare."
Terabyte-sized data files are coming
soon, said J. Tracy Weed, senior director for business development and
marketing at Synopsys and president of Bacus, an organization for mask
makers, equipment suppliers and mask users. "The GDSII data file has
run out of steam," he said. "It's time for something better."
Oasis, developed by SEMI's data path
task force, addresses problems that have surfaced with GDSII. Not only
are Oasis files much more compact than GDSII, but Oasis can more
efficiently represent flat data. Data can be directly accessed in
Oasis. And while GDSII can handle 16- and 32-bit integer widths, Oasis
can handle 64-bit fields.
But Oasis is just a step toward the
universal data model (UDM), under development by the Silicon
Integration Initiative and the SEMI data path task force. Based on the
OpenAccess API, the UDM is proposed as a common repository for all
design and manufacturing data.
Last week, Oasis Tooling, an Alamo,
Cailf.-based startup founded by Tom Grebinski, chairman of the SEMI
data path task force that defined the Oasis standard, announced Mosaic,
which Oasis Tooling called the first OpenAccess-to-Oasis translator.
MicroEDA (Santa Clara, Calif.), meanwhile, announced an Oasis plug-in
for its DFM Editor product, offering bidirectional translations not
only from OpenAccess to Oasis but also from the GDSII, LEF, DEF, DXF
and Mebes formats.
Mosiac is a bidrectional translator
that's free to members of SEMI's Oasis working group or UDM working
group until June 2005. Oasis Tooling also offers other utilities,
including an Oasis linter/profiler, Oasis writer acceptance program,
text-to-Oasis writer, Oasis-to-text decoder and reader, GDSII-to-Oasis
translator, Oasis compressor and decompressor, Oasis regression tests,
Oasis developers tool kit and OpenAccess viewer.
Grebinski, Oasis Tooling's president
and chief executive officer, said he started the company to offer a
"reference implementation" for Oasis-"all the tools and utilities that
people require to create an Oasis implementation from scratch." He said
he founded the company because SEMI had been unable to get suitable
technology donations from Oasis working group members, and development
of commercial translators wasn't happening in the way that he believed
it should.
While the most important translation
step is from OpenAccess into Oasis, it's also important to be able to
go back the other way, Grebinski said. "If you have a problem with a
mask layout and you want to take it back upstream after fracturing, you
can do that with Oasis."
While Mosaic is free to SEMI's working
group members, MicroEDA's Oasis plug-in sells for under $3,000
annually. But customers are getting more than just a translator, said
Simon Garrison, chief executive officer of MicroEDA.
"We have a centralized database, and
you can connect to seven or eight different formats," he said. Further,
he noted, users can do complete editing of the Oasis files. Users can
attach properties, such as critical nets, to Oasis geometry before it
moves to the mask shop. The plug-in, available for a free 15-day trial
download, also has a bidirectional text translator.
Translator clarity
Further information on available Oasis
translators is available at the Web sites of Oasis Tooling Inc., MicroEDA Corp. and Mentor
Graphics Corp.
