For Immediate Release

Jan 26, 2005

Santa Cruz, CA - Artwork Conversion has added polygon de-embedding to its ASM 3500 DXF to GDSII translator.

Polygon de-embedding is the ability to take a layer full of polygons that contain other polygons, figure out which surrounds which, and produce a GDSII output that sorts out the changes in polarity due to each boundary. This function is of great interest to designers of MEMs, Microwave and RF circuits, chemically milled parts and optical components; and to the photo mask manufacturers who must deal with such data.

At top you can see the mask that the customer wanted to produce. Unfortunately, when he designed the mask he drew everything on a single layer as shown below:

We see this often, not only with designers using AutoCAD, but with designers using other software such as SolidWorks and ProEngineer. Converting a drawing like this one to GDSII produces a solid black rectangle. (below)

De-Embedding Option

If you use ASM 3500's new de-embedding option during the conversion from DXF to GDSII, the program will calculate which polygons are surrounded by other polygons. At each level of embedding, the polarity is reversed. But since GDSII doesn't support negative polygons, ASM 3500 performs a boolean operation and creates the required re-entrant polygons.

The net result is that the mask produced by the GDSII file is exactly what is expected and no editing was needed.

There is no limit to the complexity of the design -- we recently de-embedded a file that contained four complex polygons, each with 15,000 vertices, on a single layer.

More details and sample data are available on Artwork's WEB site at:

www.artwork.com/gdsii/asm3500/de-embedding.htm

Price and Delivery

De-embedding is an optional module for ASM 3500 and costs $795 above the base price for ASM 3500. The option is built into the latest version of ASM 3500 and can be activated with an additional license string.

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