^ 'nanoViewer' is a free GDSII viewer, Archived at the Wayback Machine.

^ 'KLayout' is a free GDSII, LEF/DEF, OASIS, Gerber, DXF, CIF editor with DRC.

^ Going from GDSII to OASIS, Philippe Morey-Chaisemartin (Xyalis) // EETimes.

OASIS (Open Artwork System Interchange Standard).

These free tools include editors, viewers, utilities to convert the 2D layout data into common 3D formats, utilities to convert the binary format to a human readable ASCII format and program libraries. Besides the commercial vendors there are plenty of free GDSII utilities. GDSII utilities Īs the GDSII stream format is a de facto standard, it is supported by nearly all EDA software. While these attributes were designed to correspond to the 'layers of material' used in manufacturing an integrated circuit, their meaning rapidly became more abstract to reflect the way that the physical layout is designed.Īs of October 2004, many EDA software vendors have begun to support a new stream format, OASIS, which may replace GDSII. Objects contained in a GDSII file are grouped by assigning numeric attributes to them including a 'layer number', 'datatype' or 'texttype'. GDSII files were originally written on magnetic tapes this step was fittingly called tape out, although that term goes back even farther. GDSII files are usually the final output product of the IC design cycle and are handed over to IC foundries for IC fabrication. It was originally developed by Calma for its layout design system, 'Graphic Design System' ('GDS') and 'GDSII'. Despite its limited set of features and low data density, it became the industry conventional stream format for transfer of IC layout data between design tools of different vendors, all of which operated with proprietary data formats.

Initially, GDSII was designed as a stream format used to control integrated circuit photomask plotting.

Gds format