Citation
Abstract
One of the most time consuming facets of custom Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) design is obtaining hardcopy plots of the mask geometries of cells and chips. The traditional method of generating these plots is to use a multicolor pen plotter. Pen plotters are inherently slow and the plotting speed increases linearly with the number of edges that must be plotted. A moderate custom chip design at JPL now consists of more than 200,000 such edges and can take as much as eight hours to plot using a pen plotter. This paper describes software that was written at JPL to produce similar plots using a laser printer. It is shown that, for rather small layouts, the laser printer can provide nearly instantaneous turnaround. For moderate to large chip designs, the laser printer provides a factor of five or more improvement in speed over pen plotting.
Details
- Volume
- 42-83
- Published
- November 15, 1985
- Pages
- 81–91
- File Size
- 670.2 KB