How fast is Qckvu? To provide some time of a measurement we collected some large GDSII files sitting around (we wish we could provide them to you but unfortunately, they don't "belong" to us.)

We then measured the time it took Qckvu to scan, load and display the file. We also measured the time required to zoom into a tighter view and the total RAM consumed.

To understand the numbers below it helps to know how we define each step and what activity is going on.

Scan Time - Measured from time when you click on OK (open file) to the time that the scan routine is complete. Qckvu scans the entire GDSII file and builds in RAM a list of structures, layers, entities etc... which will be used during loading and display.

Load Time - Measured from the time that scan completes until the program indicates that it has fully loaded the GDSII file into RAM. Note that Qckvu compresses the GDSII data on-the-fly so that a GDSII file much larger than the machine's installed RAM can be loaded.

Display Time - measured from the time the loader is complete to the time the top level view of the chip is completely drawn on screen. Note that this includes all structures referenced by the top structure.

Display Settings - display settings affect the Display time but not the scan or loading time. Display filter=20 means that no objects smaller than 20 x 20 pixels will be displayed. AREF=0 means that arrays are shown as an outline only; Outline Mode means that the polygon stipple patterns are suppressed. All three of these settings contribute to the fastest possible display. Note that these settings are the same as used by Mentor Graphic's Streamview when it initially brings up a design.

Zoom in Time - To measure how fast Qckvu zoom's into a detailed area we start from a full screen view of the entire chip and then using the zoom window command, zoom into an area of about 1/2 x 1/2 inch. This is effectively a 25-35 factor zoom in. The time is measured from the last click of the mouse to the completion of drawing for the new view.

Memory Usage - two values are shown - memory needed to actually store the stream file; memory used by both the stream file and Qckvu itself added together.