Introduction to Tiff-Extract

Artwork is a long time developer of software that rasterizes GDSII and OASIS layout databases producing bitmaps used by mask writers and mask inspection machines. In the 20 years we have been doing this one thing has remained constant - the continuous increase in mask size along with the continual decrease in pixel size.

The result is that our tools must now handle input files measured in gigabytes and create bitmaps also measured in gigabytes.

We've developed a powerful software library, QISLIB, that can open extremely large GDSII and OASIS files quickly and efficiently.

This article shows an possible use of QISLIB to extract many small bitmap windows from a large layout file. Such windows can be used either by mask writers or mask inspection machines.

We've named this example application TiffExtract.

How it Works

TiffExtract takes as its input either a GDSII or OASIS file name and an ASCII list of "geometric" windows that one wants to extract to either TIFF or BMP format. For each window in the list it extracts all data on the specified layer crossing the window and rasterizes the geometries to produce a bitmap. The bitmap is stored to disk with a unique name.

TifExtract does not do any of the work in opening or rasterizing the layout data - it makes function calls to the QISLIB library which does all the "heavy lifting" required to open the file, extract the data in each window and rasterize it.

Next - TiffExtract Programmatic Flow