SAN FRANCISCO — Oasis Tooling has made available 100 Oasis test
cases that the company says verify Oasis variable shape beam (VSB), a
dialect of Oasis, the compact file format that has emerged as the
successor to the venerable GDSII layout format.
Oasis was developed by Semiconductor Equipment and Materials
International (SEMI) as a way of alleviating the annual loss of
billions of dollars due to GDSII data inefficiency. Proponents of Oasis
claim that it is 10-50 times more compact than GDSII, can more
efficiently represent flat data, is 64-bit compatible and requires no
data preparation as long as the dialect of the pattern generation or
inspection system is known.
Tom Grebinski, who led the SEMI
data path task force's development of Oasis
and is now president and CEO of Oasis Tooling, said in a statement that
the automatic verification of the quality and optimality of Oasis VSB
writers and readers at the front end of VSB photomask pattern
generators would be "the next step in the industry wide implementation
of Oasis."
As reported by EE Times in October
2004,
Oasis has been gaining momentum among EDA tool vendors, with Mentor
Graphics Corp., Cadence Design Systems Inc. and Synopsys Inc. each
supporting the format in some capacity.
Oasis Tooling (Alamo, Calif.) is one of two companies that has
announced OpenAccess-to-Oasis translators. The other company is
MicroEDA (Santa Clara, Calif.). Mentor already offers a GDSII-to-Oasis
translator and has said it is developing a OpenAccess-to-Oasis
translator.
Oasis Tooling said the VSB test cases would be made available to
licensees under the company's unusual "no-charge" license arrangement.
Since October 2004, the company said, it has made more than 500
verification test cases available to licensees.
The free license
arrangement is scheduled to expire on June 1.
