Question

I’m involved in developing a free on line academic instructional tool which can be used by students of VLSI Engineering.

I have decided to use Processing to develop the program.

Central to the application is the ability of the user to draw some polygons on the screen interactively using a mouse. For now, I’m looking to develop a simple graphics editor style solution using which one can draw rectangles on the Processing Canvas applet and perform the usual operations – select, move, delete, shrink etc. I intend to do further calculation on the entered rectangle sketch (or layout in VLSI terms).

So far, I have been able to develop a small prototype which allows interactive rectangle creation but it lacks the selection and transform capabilities.

I was wondering if there is any open source application or a book which can guide me in the correct direction.

Thank you.

Dhruv

Answer 1

I wrote such a tool for SRAM layout generation while I was with my previous employer. The problem is more than just putting sized rectangles, you also need to check that all the design rules are met for the technology you are working on, e.g., metal pitch, minimum size, etc. I did the work with a standard layout (2:1 aspect for the cells and 3 layers of metals, together with active area and via’s). You can check with those people (PDFS) if they are continuing to use/support the tool. Good luck with your efforts, – M.S.