Fracturing GDSII Output into Trapezoids

Some customers are using tools that have difficulty handling all angle data especially when the polygons are long and narrow. To address this issue we have developed a customized output formatter that fractures the boundaries into trapezoids.

This often arises for complex IC packages that have long diagonal traces routing data from the center to the outer edge of the package.

Example

Below you can see a portion of a complex IC package that has been converted into GDSII. There are many large, high vertex count polygons. Some IC tools may drop these polygons or render them incorrectly.

If the trapezoid fracturing option is installed and used, then the GDSII is "sliced" horizontally and output as trapezoids. The user can control both the smoothness and the maximum height of the trapezoid as needed to insure that the GDSII data is properly rendered by the IC tools.

While the fractured files are significantly larger than the non-fractured version, sometimes this is the only useful way to produce GDSII for subsequent IC based tools.