Area Fill Documentation

The Area Fill Manager

The area fill engine is controlled from a manager program called areafillmgr64. The complete description of arguments and options are detailed on the command line reference page.

One of the manager's most important features is the ability to spawn multiple engine threads in order to optimally subdivide a large problem into many smaller ones that can be quickly solved.

Other features include:

Layer Operations

Often, the metal pattern on the mask/wafer is defined not by a single GDSII data layer but rather by a combination of layers. Area Fill supports the union of layers, subtraction of one layer from another and reversal of layers.

Tiling

One of area_fill's most useful functions is in calculating density by tiling a user defined window. For example, one may need to know the density over a 10 x 10 mm area in 200 x 200 um tiles.

SuperSample Optimization

For some layer types such as the higher level metal routing layers, the objects are physically long and cross many tiles. This normally would require the program to explode the data over and over again for many tiles. By specifiying the super sample option for such layers, a much larger tile is used and large objects are exploded once and cached. This can result in 10X-30X speed improvements on such layers.

Output

Area Fill's output is an ascii text file. If the user has specified tiling, then there will be a table output showing the area and center coordinate of each tile.