InductEx
The LayoutEditor comes with simple extraction tools. These tools may be good for some applications. However often special parameter extraction is required. The LayoutEditor is design in a vexible way, so that easily other tools can be integrated. Here it is shown how it can be used with InductEx, a tool to extract inductance for superconductivity circuits.
About InductEx
InductEx is a three-dimensional magnetoquasistatic inductance calculator for multi-terminal superconductive integrated circuit layouts.
InductEx and its calculation engine FastHenry (modified) can be downloaded as 32-bit or 64-bit binary (executable) files for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. FastHenry is open source, and the modified code is available as well.
InductEx is a command line tool and requires a GDSII file and a netlist and a technology file as input.
LayoutEditor Integration
The LayoutEditor integration is made in a way, that with a simple macro call the InductEx inductance extraction is triggered and the results are displayed in a TextEditor. Installation is simple:
- create a working directory,
- copy the two macros there:
- adjust line 24 of macro inductex.layout to this working path,
copy the InductEx binaries to this working folder,
copy/create a technology file in this folder as well, technology files can be imported into the LayoutEditor by the import feature of the LayerManager,
3d DXF data generated with inp2DXf or intensity can be imported to the 3dView of the LayoutEditor by a macro command: "layout->view3dTool->import3d("filename");"
(to use all feature of this integration version 20120824 or newer of the LayoutEditor is required)
Example
Download:
Integration Technique
The main macro inductex.layout will store the current design to a gds file in the working folder and also store the current netlist of the SchematicEditor in the InductEx format there as well. To be able to store the InductEx netlist format, which is very similar to spice, the netlist setup is checked first. Just the used devices/libraries need to have a short netlist description for InductEx. The LTSpiceLibrary shipped with the LayoutEditor has a Inductance and a Coupling-Device which includes this information. After creating all required files the binary file of the extraction tool is called and a callback macro called with termination of the tool is set. The callback macro show-output.layout opens a TextEditor and display the extractrion results there.