Select GDSII File

This page describes the general procedure for converting a GDSII file to Tiff raster format using the GDS_RIP Windows GUI.
When starting the program, you will see the following main menu.

Click on the Browse to select the GDSII file you want to process. For this example, we will pick demo5.gds which is located in the GDS_RIP examples directory.
The program will scan your file and display information about it.
At this point, you should also set the Working Directory to the same examples directory. The output files will be saved in this direcory.
Once you are done, hit the Next button to proceed.

Select Structure/Cell

From the Main Menu, Click on the cell you want to process. For our example, pick the cell TOP.
Once you are done, hit the Next button to proceed.

Select Layers

From the Main Menu, Click on the layers you want to process. For our example, pick the layer 4 which is the main metal layer.
Once you are done, hit the Next button to proceed.

Configure GDS to Tiff

In this menu you can set up the parameters for the conversion such as DPI or pixel size, the raster buffer size the program should use for each band, and so on. You should pick the proper DPI of your choice and leave the rest of the parameters as defaults. In this example, we will use 1 micron pixel size (which translates to 25400 DPI), and raster buffer size of 256MB.
Once you are done, hit the Next button to proceed.

Preferences

The Preferences menu allows you to define some more parameters such as mirror, scale, rotation, window to process, invert image and more.
For our example, we will stick with the defaults and process the full extents of the chip.
Once you are done, hit the Next button to proceed.

In the next Preferences menu, you can select the type of output format you want.
Available options include TIFF, BMP (horizontal striping), and top down BMP (vertical striping).

Once you are done, hit the Next button to proceed.

Raster Tiff File

The program will start processing your file and after a few seconds the raster file will be saved to disk.
You can also see the command line used to process your file. The command line is at the bottom
of the menu and it will help you create your own script or batch file in case you want to run
the tool without the GUI.
Here is the command line used in our example...

Command Line:

Gds2Tiff C:\wcad\GDS_RIP\EXAMPLES\demo5.gds TOP +4 -ram:256 -pixelsize:1 -dbs:4000000 -thrnum:1 -nbuff:1 -out:Band