Introduction
Gdsriplib is a library that rasterizes GDSII files at very high resolutions. It is built as a static library designed to be linked into the user's main program. Gdsriplib is multi-threaded increasing throughput on CPUs that support hyperthreading or on multiple CPUs that share a common pool of memory.
Block diagram of gdsriblib's internals.
The GDSII stream file is loaded into memory. The internal representation of this data is generally more compact than the file itself, so one does not need 100 MB of RAM to load a 100 MB GDSII file.
The internal module, gdsmachine, is responsible for exploding (flattening) the GDSII data and extracting a stream of polygons for the rasterizer to process - these polygons are held in memory. (The number of polygons passed to the rasterizer at one time can be controlled by the -dbs argument)
The rasterizer converts the polygons into a bitmap. When complete, the calling program can access the bitmap using a pointer provided by gds_rip.