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GDS2ASCII is a utility program that converts the binary GDSII stream format into an ASCII file. Once in ASCII the designer can use a variety of powerful tools written in languages such as awk, sed and perl to check and modify his file without the need for a CAD system.

The ASCII file can then be reconverted into GDSII stream using the ASCII2GDS module.


data flow for GDSII to ASCII and ASCII to GDSII

Programmers can also create GDSII files by synthesizing the ASCII format and then converting the ASCII file into a GDSII binary layout file.

Both programs are command line tools and designed to be called either from scripts or from other programs.



Supported GDSII Elements

GDS2ASCII supports the following GDSII record types:

GDS_BGNLIB library
GDS_BGNSTR  begin structure
GDS_BOUNDARY  boundary
GDS_BOX  box (rarely used)
GDS_ENDSTR  ends structure
GDS_NODE  node; rarely used
GDS_PATH  path element
GDS_SREF  cell placement
GDS_AREF  cell array
GDS_TEXT  text element

Output Formats

GDS2ASCII writes two different output formats:

ACS standard - a verbose format, easy to read and parse.

Compressed Shape - a compressed version designed to minimize file size.

Cell Instance Finder - a utility which exports a text file with insertion points of specific cells.

gds2ascii command line - Describes all the command line options of gds2ascii.



Supported Platforms

  • Linux64 (RedHat 64, Suse, Ubuntu)

  • Windows 64 bit