Coordinate Systems

Coordinate systems (subtypes of AbstractCoordinateSystem) group geometric objects into a single structure with a common origin and coordinate axes. They can contain references to other DeviceLayout.GeometryStructures, a GeometryEntity list, and metadata for each entity.

AbstractCoordinateSystems

DeviceLayout.AbstractCoordinateSystemType
AbstractCoordinateSystem{S<:Coordinate} <: GeometryStructure{S}

Abstract supertype for coordinate systems, including CoordinateSystem and Cell.

Also exists to avoid circular definitions involving the concrete AbstractCoordinateSystem types and subtypes of GeometryReference.

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Because these are subtypes of GeometryStructure, they can be used with the transformation interface as well as the structure interface including bounds and other operations.

DeviceLayout.jl defines the concrete CoordinateSystem as a backend-agnostic (or "native") representation that can be converted to other representations as necessary, and Cell as the concrete representation corresponding to the GDSII format. There is also the subtype SchematicDrivenLayout.Schematic, which composes a CoordinateSystem with schematic-level information about component connectivity.

Referenced coordinate systems

Coordinate systems can be arrayed or referenced within other coordinate systems. These can be accessed in the array returned by refs(cs) or by indexing the parent coordinate system or reference with the referenced structure's name, as in cs["referenced_cs"]["deeper_cs"].

The methods addref! and addarr! are provided for adding structure references and array references.

DeviceLayout.CoordinateSystems.addref!Function
addref!(c1::AbstractCoordinateSystem, cr::GeometryReference)

Add the reference cr to the list of references in c1.

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addref!(c1::AbstractCoordinateSystem{T},
    c2::GeometryStructure,
    origin=zero(Point{T});
    kwargs...)

Add a reference to c2 to the list of references in c1.

The reference to c2 has origin origin; x-reflection, magnification factor, and rotation are set by keywords arguments.

Synonyms are accepted for these keywords:

  • X-reflection: :xrefl, :xreflection, :refl, :reflect, :xreflect, :xmirror, :mirror
  • Magnification: :mag, :magnification, :magnify, :zoom, :scale
  • Rotation: :rot, :rotation, :rotate, :angle
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DeviceLayout.CoordinateSystems.addarr!Function
addarr!(
    c1::AbstractCoordinateSystem{T},
    c2::GeometryStructure,
    origin::Point=zero(Point{T});
    kwargs...
)

Add an ArrayReference to c2 to the list of references in c1.

The reference to c2 has origin origin. Keyword arguments specify the column vector, row vector, number of columns, number of rows, x-reflection, magnification factor, and rotation.

Synonyms are accepted for these keywords:

  • Column vector dc::Point{T}: :deltacol, :dcol, :dc, :vcol, :colv, :colvec, :colvector, :columnv, :columnvec, :columnvector
  • Row vector: :deltarow, :drow, :dr, :vrow, :rv, :rowvec, :rowvector
  • Number of columns: :nc, :numcols, :numcol, :ncols, :ncol
  • Number of rows: :nr, :numrows, :numrow, :nrows, :nrow
  • X-reflection: :xrefl, :xreflection, :refl, :reflect, :xreflect, :xmirror, :mirror
  • Magnification: :mag, :magnification, :magnify, :zoom, :scale
  • Rotation: :rot, :rotation, :rotate, :angle
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addarr!(
    c1::AbstractCoordinateSystem,
    c2::GeometryStructure,
    c::AbstractRange,
    r::AbstractRange;
    kwargs...
)

Add an ArrayReference to c2 to the list of references in c1, based on ranges.

c specifies column coordinates and r for the rows. Pairs from c and r specify the origins of the repeated cells. The extrema of the ranges therefore do not specify the extrema of the resulting ArrayReference's bounding box; some care is required.

Keyword arguments specify x-reflection, magnification factor, and rotation, with synonyms allowed:

  • X-reflection: :xrefl, :xreflection, :refl, :reflect, :xreflect, :xmirror, :mirror
  • Magnification: :mag, :magnification, :magnify, :zoom, :scale
  • Rotation: :rot, :rotation, :rotate, :angle
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Flattening

Sometimes it's also helpful use the flatten operation to produce an equivalent coordinate system with no references—that is, with all its elements at the top level. CoordinateSystems and Cells can also be flattened in place with flatten!.

DeviceLayout.CoordinateSystems.flatten!Method
flatten!(c::AbstractCoordinateSystem, depth::Integer=-1, metadata_filter=nothing, max_copy=Inf)

Recursively flatten references and arrays up to a hierarchical depth, adding their elements to c with appropriate transformations.

The references and arrays that were flattened are then discarded. Deeper references and arrays are brought upwards and are not discarded.

This function has no effect for depth == 0, and unlimited depth by default.

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Cells

Cells are the concrete AbstractCoordinateSystem representation corresponding to the GDSII format. Accordingly, they hold Polygons with metadata of type GDSMeta (added using render!). They can also hold Text objects, and they can be saved directly to a .gds file.

DeviceLayout.Cells.CellType
mutable struct Cell{S<:Coordinate}

A cell has a name and contains polygons and references to CellArray or CellReference objects. It also records the time of its own creation. As currently implemented it mirrors the notion of cells in GDSII files.

To add elements, use render!. To add references, use addref! or addarr!. To add text, use text!.

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DeviceLayout.Cells.CellMethod
Cell(name::AbstractString)

Convenience constructor for Cell{typeof(1.0UPREFERRED)}.

DeviceLayout.UPREFERRED is a constant set according to the unit preference in Project.toml or LocalPreferences.toml. The default ("PreferNanometers") gives const UPREFERRED = DeviceLayout.nm, with mixed-unit operations preferring conversion to nm.

Unit preference does not affect the database scale for GDS export.

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DeviceLayout.Cells.dbscaleMethod
dbscale(c::Cell)

Give the database scale for a cell. The database scale is the smallest increment of length that will be represented in the output CAD file. This is different from the working coordinate type T of the Cell.

The database scale defaults to 1nm (1.0nm if T <: FloatCoordinate), but can be changed by updating c.dbscale to a new Unitful.Length quantity.

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DeviceLayout.Cells.dbscaleMethod
dbscale(cell::Cell...)

Choose an appropriate database scale for a GDSII file given Cells of different types. The smallest database scale of all cells considered is returned.

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DeviceLayout.GDSMetaType
struct GDSMeta <: DeviceLayout.Meta
    layer::Int
    datatype::Int
    GDSMeta() = new(DEFAULT_LAYER, DEFAULT_DATATYPE)
    GDSMeta(l) = new(l, DEFAULT_DATATYPE)
    GDSMeta(l, d) = new(l, d)
end

Metadata associated with GDSII format. Default layer and datatype are 0.

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DeviceLayout.render!Method
render!(c::Cell, p::Polygon, meta::GDSMeta=GDSMeta())

Render a polygon p to cell c, defaulting to plain styling. If p has more than 8190 (set by DeviceLayout's GDS_POLYGON_MAX constant), then it is partitioned into smaller polygons which are then rendered. Environment variable ENV["GDS_POLYGON_MAX"] will override this constant. The partitioning algorithm implements guillotine cutting, that goes through at least one existing vertex and in manhattan directions. Cuts are selected by ad hoc optimzation for "nice" partitions.

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DeviceLayout.saveMethod
save(::Union{AbstractString,IO}, cell0::Cell{T}, cell::Cell...)
save(f::File{format"GDS"}, cell0::Cell, cell::Cell...;
    name="GDSIILIB", userunit=1μm, modify=now(), acc=now(),
    verbose=false)

This bottom method is implicitly called when you use the convenient syntax of the top method: save("/path/to/my.gds", cells_i_want_to_save...)

Keyword arguments include:

  • name: used for the internal library name of the GDSII file and probably inconsequential for modern workflows.
  • userunit: sets what 1.0 corresponds to when viewing this file in graphical GDS editors with inferior unit support.
  • modify: date of last modification.
  • acc: date of last accession. It would be unusual to have this differ from now().
  • verbose: monitor the output of traverse! and order! to see if something funny is happening while saving.
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The type parameter S of a Cell{S} object determine the type of the coordinates of all polygons in a cell, including the units and whether integer or floating-point values are used. Currently, you cannot do a whole lot (particularly with regard to paths) if the cell has integer coordinates. However, they do have an inherent advantage because the coordinates are exact, and ultimately the GDSII file represents shapes with integer coordinates.

Separately, the Cell has a "database scale" (the dbscale field) applied when saving that defaults to 1nm but can be changed.

For most cases, if you want to use units, Cell("my_cell_name", nm) is a good way to construct a cell which will ultimately have all coordinates rounded to the nearest nm when exported into GDSII. You can add polygons with whatever length units you want to such a cell, and the coordinates will be converted automatically to nm.

If you don't want units, just construct the cell with a name only: Cell("my_cell_name") will return a Cell{Float64} object unless you have set a unit preference. In this case too, the ultimate database resolution is 1nm; until exporting the cell into a GDSII file, the coordinates are interpreted to be in units of 1μm.

When saving cells to disk, keep in mind that cells should have unique names. We don't have an automatic renaming scheme implemented to avoid clashes. To help with this, we provide a function uniquename to generate unique names based on human-readable prefixes.

When saving cells to disk, there will be a tree of interdependencies and logically one would prefer to write the leaf nodes of the tree before any dependent cells. These functions are used to traverse the tree and then find the optimal ordering.

DeviceLayout.CoordinateSystems.traverse!Function
traverse!(a::AbstractArray, c::GeometryStructure, level=1)

Given a coordinate system, recursively traverse its references for other coordinate systems and add to array a some tuples: (level, c). level corresponds to how deep the coordinate system was found, and c is the found coordinate system.

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DeviceLayout.CoordinateSystems.order!Function
order!(a::AbstractArray)

Given an array of tuples like that coming out of traverse!, we sort by the level, strip the level out, and then retain unique entries. The aim of this function is to determine an optimal writing order when saving pattern data (although the GDSII spec does not require cells to be in a particular order, there may be performance ramifications).

For performance reasons, this function modifies a but what you want is the returned result array.

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CoordinateSystems

CoordinateSystems are "DeviceLayout-native" AbstractCoordinateSystems. Unlike Cells, they can hold any GeometryEntity, not just Polygons, as well as references to any GeometryStructure, not just Cells. The idea is to work with an exact or logical representation of geometric elements as long as possible, deferring decisions about output representations until rendering time. This allows things like calculating intersection points between Paths in a hierarchy of CoordinateSystems and references, or rendering exact curves to a SolidModel.

Because of this, we add entities to a CoordinateSystem with place! rather than render!. The different verb is meant to convey that the entity is added as-is rather than potentially converted to some other representation. (For convenience, render! still works with CoordinateSystems, but it's just an alias for place!.)

DeviceLayout.CoordinateSystems.CoordinateSystemType
mutable struct CoordinateSystem{S<:Coordinate} <: AbstractCoordinateSystem{S}
    name::String
    elements::Vector{GeometryEntity{S}}
    meta::Vector{Meta}
    refs::Vector{GeometryReference}
    create::DateTime

    CoordinateSystem{S}(x, y, ym, z, t) where {S} = new{S}(x, y, ym, z, t)
    CoordinateSystem{S}(x, y, ym, z) where {S} = new{S}(x, y, ym, z, now())
    CoordinateSystem{S}(x, y, ym) where {S} = new{S}(x, y, ym, GeometryReference[], now())
    CoordinateSystem{S}(x) where {S} =
        new{S}(x, GeometryEntity{S}[], Meta[], GeometryReference[], now())
    CoordinateSystem{S}() where {S} = begin
        c = new{S}()
        c.elements = GeometryEntity{S}[]
        c.meta = Meta[]
        c.refs = GeometryReference[]
        c.create = now()
        c
    end
end

A CoordinateSystem has a name and contains geometry entities (Polygons, Rectangles) and references to GeometryStructure objects. It also records the time of its own creation.

To add elements, use place!, or use render! to be agnostic between CoordinateSystem and Cell. To add references, use addref! or addarr!.

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DeviceLayout.CoordinateSystems.place!Function
place!(cs::CoordinateSystem, ent::GeometryEntity, metadata)

Place ent in cs with metadata metadata.

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place!(cs::CoordinateSystem, s::GeometryStructure)

Place a reference to s in cs.

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place!(cs::CoordinateSystem, p::Path, metadata=p.metadata)

Place a reference to p in cs and set metadata to metadata.

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As with a Cell{S}, a CoordinateSystem{S} has a coordinate type parameter S. Unlike Cells, a CoordinateSystem is not tied to a database unit (a GDSII concept).

Semantic metadata and rendering to cells

Since CoordinateSystems are intended to be backend-agnostic, a useful pattern is to give coordinate objects "semantic" metadata, consisting of a layer name Symbol as well as level and index attributes. This metadata can then be processed with designer-provided methods when rendering to an output format.

DeviceLayout.SemanticMetaType
struct SemanticMeta <: DeviceLayout.Meta
    layer::Symbol
    index::Int = 1
    level::Int = 1
end
SemanticMeta(layer::String; kwargs...)
SemanticMeta(meta::Meta; kwargs...)

DeviceLayout-native representation of an object's layer information and attributes.

Semantic metadata refers to the meaning of an element without reference to a fixed encoding. For example, “this polygon is in the negative of the ground plane” is semantic, while “this polygon is in GDS layer 1, datatype 2” is not. The semantic metadata is used in the final render step, where a layout is converted from a CoordinateSystem to a representation corresponding to a particular output format (e.g., a Cell for GDSII). A call to render!(cell::Cell{S}, cs::CoordinateSystem; map_meta = identity, kwargs...) will use the map_meta function to map each GeometryEntity's metadata to GDSMeta.

The level and index fields do not have a strict interpretation imposed by DeviceLayout. (In this sense they are similar to GDS datatype.) The suggested use is as follows:

  • index distinguishes numbered instances within a layer, for example in greyscale lithography or port numbering
  • level distinguishes instances of a layer occurring in different contexts, such as in a 3D stack where equivalent layers may be present in multiple levels
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DeviceLayout.layerFunction
layer(m::Meta)

The layer specified by m, as a Symbol.

For example, layer(GDSMeta(1, 2)) is :GDS1_2, and layername(SemanticMeta(:base)) is :base.

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DeviceLayout.layerindexFunction
layerindex(m::Meta)

The index specified by metadata m. Defaults to 1 for metadata types without an index.

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DeviceLayout.layernameFunction
layername(m::Meta)

The layer specified by m, as a String.

For example, layer(GDSMeta(1, 2)) is "GDS1_2", and layername(SemanticMeta(:base)) is "base".

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DeviceLayout.levelFunction
level(m::Meta)

The level specified by metadata s. Defaults to 1 for metadata types without a level.

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This means that a CoordinateSystem can be rendered to a Cell for output to a GDS format. During rendering, an entity::GeometryEntity with metadata SemanticMeta(:ground_plane) would be mapped to to_polygons(entity) with GDS layer number and datatype (for example, GDSMeta(1,0)) corresponding to the ground plane according to a mapping function map_meta provided to render!.

DeviceLayout.Cells.CellMethod
Cell(cs::CoordinateSystem{S}) = Cell{S}(cs)
Cell(cs::CoordinateSystem, unit::CoordinateUnits) = Cell{typeof(1.0unit)}(cs)
Cell{S}(cs::CoordinateSystem) where {S}

Construct a Cell from a CoordinateSystem by rendering its contents, reproducing the reference hierarchy.

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DeviceLayout.render!Method
render!(cell::Cell{S}, cs::GeometryStructure;
    memoized_cells=Dict{CoordinateSystem, Cell}(),
    map_meta = identity,
    kwargs...) where {S}

Render a geometry structure (e.g., CoordinateSystem) to a cell.

Passes each element and its metadata (mapped by map_meta if a method is supplied) to render!(::Cell, element, ::Meta), traversing the references such that if a CoordinateSystem is referred to in multiple places, it will become a single cell referred to in multiple places.

Rendering a GeometryEntity to a Cell uses the optional keyword arguments

  • map_meta, a function that takes a Meta object and returns another Meta object (or nothing, in which case rendering is skipped)

Usage note: calling this function with non-empty dictionary memoized_cells = Dict{CoordinateSystem, Cell}(cs => cell) is effectively a manual override that forces cs to render as cell.

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Note that Cells inherit the names of rendered CoordinateSystems, so the original coordinate systems ought to have unique names (for example using uniquename).