a fast IC Layout Editor/Viewer (original) (raw)

Glade (GDS, LEF And DEF Editor)

Glade (Gds, Lef And Def Editor) is a freeware IC layout editor capable of reading GDS2, OASIS, LEF and DEF. It can load and display large design databases with its fast, lightweight object-oriented database - for example load a 677,000 net / 482,000 special net / 1,210,000 instance LEF/DEF design in 880Mb memory in 72 seconds on a 3GHz PC. Or load a 1.5Gb GDS2 file in 40 seconds. Glade uses the Qt cross-platform GUI toolkit for a modern GUI - not something out of the 80's or 90's written in Motif or other archaic GUIs, and uses OpenGL for hardware accelerated graphics when available to give vastly superior display speeds compared to other layout editors, falling back to software rendering only if you do not have suitable hardware.

Glade is currently available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris, so it will run on your laptop.

Unlike many other "polygon pushers", it includes support for a full connectivity model, parameterised cells (PCells), DRC, LPE, LVS and many other powerful tools, and is being continually enhanced by user suggestions - you're not expected to struggle with compiling or debugging it, or trying to understand obscure open source code to get what you want done.

Glade is extendable using Python scripting, allowing access to the database and gui via SWIG wrapping of C++ functions.

Download the Windows 32 bit build (tested on XP, Vista and Windows 7) version 4.3.36

Download the Windows 64 bit build (tested on Windows 7) version 4.3.36

Download the Linux 32 bit build for RHEL4 (tested on CentOs 4.7) version 4.3.36

Download the Linux 64 bit build for RHEL4 (tested on CentOs 4.7) version 4.3.36

Download the Linux 32 bit build for RHEL5 (tested on CentOs 5.7) version 4.3.36

Download the Linux 64 bit build for RHEL5 (tested on CentOs 5.7) version 4.3.36

Download the Linux 32 bit build (tested on Ubuntu 10.04) version 4.3.36

Download the Linux 64 bit build (tested on Ubuntu 10.04) version 4.3.36

Download the Solaris 32 bit build (tested on Solaris 2.8) version 4.3.30

Download the Mac OS X 64 bit build (tested on OS X 10.8.2 aka Mountain Lion) version 4.3.36

A list of changes can be found here.

A Windows build of spice3f5 with a Qt gui is available in 32 bit or 64 bit .

The Glade user forum can be found here.