Similar to the microelectronic industry, the photonic designer needs to be able to verify that his design conforms to the manufacturers' requirements. This involves checking designs for violations of specific rules. These rules range from simple width and spacing to more complex rules such as gaps, and non-conforming offsets and bend radii in the waveguides.
dw-2000 XDRC provides designers of optical components built using semiconductor fabrication techniques with a physical verification tool that is ideal for verifying design rules imposed by the most advanced technologies. Its
features, performance and accuracy are unparalleled on low cost platforms. Its ability to handle all angle geometries makes it even more flexible and capable of locating errors other software won't.
The scripting language is easy to learn and extremely powerful. XDRC's comprehensive commands provide designers with a reliable solution for validating masks before they are manufactured.
Commands include: width, spacing, overlap, extensions, inside, outside, touch, enclose, area, density, edge and segment selection, conditional checks (such as angle, edge length), property checks (such as area, ratio), conjunctive rules, error filtering (such as projections) and connectivity.
It can be integrated with dw-2000 Layout Editor for easy error navigation, including: legend dialog to facilitate error count, mask and navigation, color-coded error representation, and plain English error representation. This allows designers to have a close interaction between the errors and the layout where they can correct them.
Physical Verification - Benefits
- Using an automated design rule checker (DRC) will save money for a number of reasons:
- It is far more efficient to check for design violations with an automated tool than to have a designer manually search through the design when he could be designing.
- Manually checking designs is prone to human errors, which could result in manufacturing masks that need to be discarded because they do not conform to the design intent.
- Allows the designer to perform the checks in-house so that he can fix them, before a foundry or consultant is involved.
- Faster time-to-market is possible because of the time saved over manually checking designs and the elimination of cycles that occur between the designer and the foundry or mask shop.
- Improves the manufacturing yields and the quality of the designs.
For those who require basic rule checking without the need for a comprehensive solution such as XDRC, we offer our Standard DRC tool.
dw-2000 Standard DRC is a practical solution for verifying standard rules. To learn more about its features, click
here >>>