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Prop2 Layout Viewer - Try it out!!! — Parallax Forums

Prop2 Layout Viewer - Try it out!!!

cgraceycgracey Posts: 14,152
edited 2016-04-26 12:32 in Propeller 2
This is something really neat...

I got the GDSII layout file from Treehouse the other day and loaded into our Tanner EDA tool, which is a 2-dimensional layout editor. After examining it for a bit, I was thinking it would be great if I could see the layout in three dimensions. It turns out that a Dutch university made a 3-D GDSII viewer, and it's free! It really is snappy and very simple to use. It even has a trace function, where you can click on a wire and it greys out everything but the conductive path. And get a load if this: It's only 1.2MB - and that includes Windows, Linux, and Mac versions!!! I think it just takes the database and builds a world that your graphic chip renders from whatever perspective you select. It's 'live', like a video game, so you can fly through the layout at a 60Hz frame-update rate.

Download the viewer here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/gds3d/?source=typ_redirect

Then, get this file that contains our GDSII layout and a setup file for the viewer:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9NbgkdrupkHNGwyWS1WZFZCaWc/view?usp=sharing

Unzip that file into the same base directory that the GDS3D program resides in. Then type this, if you're in Windows, to run it:

win32\gds3d -p onc18.txt -i Prop2_v1.gds

Hit F1 to get a keystroke menu.

You can see every cell in the padframe, and even select them, individually, and view them in isolation. This program doesn't show text labels, just polygons. For anyone who's interested in what a layout looks like, this is a goldmine. This is all full-custom, from schematic, so it is quite sensible to look at.

Here is the THICK_DAC_SLOW, an 8-bit R-2R DAC that is in each PAD_IO and feeds into a comparator for I/O pin level sensing. It uses common-centroid resistor layout for precision. Those red lines are poly resistors that are about 1k-ohm/square. Being ~50um x 0.75um, they are about 67k-ohm each:
THICK_DAC_SLOW.png

Here is a view showing N-well, P and N implants, active, poly, and contact layers. Can you spot the NAND gates?
THICK_DAC_SLOW_poly.png

And here is a trace of one of the split inverters' outputs that drives a resistor in the R-2R network. That's a lot of jumping around. Who's going to drill all those vias?
THICK_DAC_SLOW_trace.png


It's nice inside these ADC's. Does it ever get hot in here?
ADC.png
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Comments

  • Neat! :)
  • ozpropdev wrote: »
    Neat! :)

    IKR!?! Now, if only I knew what I was looking at...
  • Somethings just boggle my mind. I'm feeling justifiably boggled looking at these.

    Are those little grey boxes where you load up the magic smoke?
  • Wow that's neat. Feels a bit like approaching the death star and looking for that thermal exhaust port

    Thanks for sharing
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    Awesome.

    Sadly it does not work here.

    Compiles fine on this Debian x86-64 but:
    $ ./GDS3D -p onc18.txt -i Prop2_v1.gds
    Segmentation fault
    
  • cgraceycgracey Posts: 14,152
    Heater. wrote: »
    Awesome.

    Sadly it does not work here.

    Compiles fine on this Debian x86-64 but:
    $ ./GDS3D -p onc18.txt -i Prop2_v1.gds
    Segmentation fault
    

    No Mac or Windows?
  • evanhevanh Posts: 15,915
    The binary in the linux directory runs fine for me. Smooth as, too! :)

    Ick! The controls are all backward. Time to use that source code ...
  • evanhevanh Posts: 15,915
    Wine runs the Windoze version fine too. Looks and feels totally identical.
  • cgraceycgracey Posts: 14,152
    Once you get acclimated to the mouse movement, you can turn and go anywhere.

    I need to drive all through this thing and identify places where the routing needs beefing up. This passes LVS (layout vs. schematic), but there are some big loads, like those PMOS and NMOS devices near the bond pad, that need a lot more power and ground metal going to them.
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    No Mac or Windows around here.

    But sure enough the prebuilt binary works.

    That really is awesome.

    Now to hack it up to export all those rectangles as babylon format and we can view it the web.

  • cgraceycgracey Posts: 14,152
    Heater. wrote: »
    No Mac or Windows around here.

    But sure enough the prebuilt binary works.

    That really is awesome.

    Now to hack it up to export all those rectangles as babylon format and we can view it the web.

    Get used to using ctrl-mousewheel to disable and enable layers in sequence. It's really handy.

    Hit "T" and try going into the various blocks of PAD_IO. There's lots to see.
  • evanhevanh Posts: 15,915
    Heater. wrote: »
    But sure enough the prebuilt binary works.

    "make bininfo" on the original tells of needing libpthread.so which doesn't show up in the quick recompile. It's also 32bit.
  • Works nicely in LinuxMint straight from the binary. As to "lots to see" I think that's an understatement!
  • cgraceycgracey Posts: 14,152
    Here is a CMOS NAND gate:
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  • evanhevanh Posts: 15,915
    I'll throw in a piccy of straight plan view with the top few layers removed showing some lots to see ...
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  • cgraceycgracey Posts: 14,152
    edited 2016-04-26 13:48
    Here's an inverter. You can spot these all over the layout. They're not just used for inversion, but for current buffering to drive more gates and long wires quickly. My rule of thumb has been to have one gate output drive no more than four other nearby gate inputs. By placing a 4x inverter after a gate, you can drive 16 nearby gate inputs quickly. There are inverters of many sizes in the layout.
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  • evanhevanh Posts: 15,915
    edited 2016-04-26 14:22
    Can't say I'm making sense just yet, it's still just pretty pictures.

    Chip, in your third piccy - split inverter, How come there is so many layers there just in a straight up vertical stack? And what's with the multiple sandwiched cubes?
  • Peter JakackiPeter Jakacki Posts: 10,193
    edited 2016-04-26 14:23
    This is the part I'm seeing for the inverter.

    Screenshot%20from%202016-04-27%2000%3A34%3A38.png
  • evanhevanh Posts: 15,915
    Oh, new tool to find ...
  • Ugh. If I try expanding PAD_IO, the app crashes...
  • Fascinating.

    Is this the hardware equivalent of machine code viewing, the schematic conversion to physical constructs.

    A s(t)imulation of this model showing the various wires and elements switching would be the next step, though if such things exist I suspect they are big money?
  • cgraceycgracey Posts: 14,152
    edited 2016-04-26 19:51
    evanh wrote: »
    Can't say I'm making sense just yet, it's still just pretty pictures.

    Chip, in your third piccy - split inverter, How come there is so many layers there just in a straight up vertical stack? And what's with the multiple sandwiched cubes?

    Those cubes are vias. They are drawn as squares, but wind up round after fabrication. They are interconnects for the metal layers.

    In this case, the layout guy just decided to use even metal layers for running wires one direction, while odd layers were used to run wires perpendicularly. You can see how, by breaking that rule, you could save a whole layer of metal. That's going to get optimized. We should see an improvement in the next layout, which will be done in two days. I'll post it here.
  • cgraceycgracey Posts: 14,152
    edited 2016-04-26 20:09
    This is the part I'm seeing for the inverter.

    Screenshot%20from%202016-04-27%2000%3A34%3A38.png

    That's a very nice picture of an inverter. You can see the cyan N-well, in which the PMOS transistor is built. NMOS transistors are built right in the substrate. In each case, there are some P+ and N+ implant areas. In digital logic, PMOS transistors' poly gates (red) are always 'wider' than the NMOS transistors' gates, since they are not as conductive. The gate 'length' is actually the narrow dimension of the poly that divides the active area (yellow).
  • cgraceycgracey Posts: 14,152
    edited 2016-04-26 20:04
    78rpm wrote: »
    Fascinating.

    Is this the hardware equivalent of machine code viewing, the schematic conversion to physical constructs.

    A s(t)imulation of this model showing the various wires and elements switching would be the next step, though if such things exist I suspect they are big money?

    I don't know that such a simulation tool exists, though I'd like to make one. If only chip fabrication weren't so expensive, there would be a nice market for such a thing.

    What you are seeing in that GDS3D screenshot is the mask data drawn verbatim in 2-D, and then extruded into the Z axis to show what the fabricated chip will be shaped like.

    Imagine all those right angles being smoothed away and you'll have an idea of what actually winds up existing:

    postfab.GIF
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  • cgraceycgracey Posts: 14,152
    edited 2016-04-26 20:07
    To get sharp features through fabrication, the drawn mask data from the CAD program is run through an optical proximity correction (OPC) algorithm to get the final data used to make the actual masks.

    Look at this picture:

    OPC.jpg
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    OPC.jpg 46.6K
  • Cluso99Cluso99 Posts: 18,069
    Gee this is interesting or should I say mind blowing! Thanks for posting and the explanations.

    I have to unpack my laptop and download the program and files and get my hands dirty.

    There seems nowhere else where you can this sort of education outside of real jobs. Hats off to Chip and Parallax for allowing us to participate!
  • ElectrodudeElectrodude Posts: 1,657
    edited 2016-04-27 02:50
    What is this diagonal line in layer M3 through some of the holes in the pad?

    Set the top cell to PAD_IO, CTRL+scroll down until all layers above M3 are invisible, and then zoom in on the square pad on the top.

    p2_pad_diag_line.png

    This next image is with only layer M3 visible, viewed from underneath. You can see it's not rectangular, not to mention the Z-buffer glitches due to coplanar polygons.

    p2_pad_diag_line_under.png

    The problem could easily just be my computer, a 2009 Macbook running Gentoo Linux with an Intel GMA GPU that probably has bad drivers.


    EDIT: If I set the top cell to PAD_BASIC, it goes away. But it consistently comes back if I look at PAD_IO.


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  • jmgjmg Posts: 15,173
    edited 2016-04-27 03:11
    cgracey wrote: »
    .... We should see an improvement in the next layout, which will be done in two days. I'll post it here.
    If you are doing a respin of the PAD ring, can you include a Crystal CL fix to have no-added C choice ?
    I think there was a spare decode slot, and IIRC you have Nett=15pf and Nett=30pF lines, but no Nett=PinC for lowest Cap crystals, or Clipped Sine feed cases.

    More steps would be nice, but I can see that is more work ? 3 should be simple.

    3 CL Steps also allows some correction action, where you target the mid value, and then measure and nudge CL values Up/Down using the other 2 choices, to trim for long term 'zero-drift'.
    This can also allow deliberate clock modulate for sampling, to avoid exact sync effects.

    Did you look at the PLL Counters, and allowing (Crystal / M) -> PFD = VCO/N ?
    Present PFD= crystal, is quite restrictive in VCO choices.
    A 5 bit Crystal divider keeps PFD in the MHz + region, & gives 8-9 bits VCO div.

    Examples :
    you can generate a USB related 48 or 96 or 144 MHz from a low cost GPS 19.2MHz Clipped Sine TCXO
    or, you can use 19.2 or 26MHz GPS TCXOs to PLL to an exact 100.000MHz
    - That's not possible with PFD=Crystal.
  • jmgjmg Posts: 15,173
    cgracey wrote: »
    In this case, the layout guy just decided to use even metal layers for running wires one direction, while odd layers were used to run wires perpendicularly. You can see how, by breaking that rule, you could save a whole layer of metal. That's going to get optimized. ...
    Does saving a layer on the Pins area actually help any, if the Logic area routing determines the total metal-layer count anyway ?

  • evanhevanh Posts: 15,915
    EDIT: If I set the top cell to PAD_BASIC, it goes away. But it consistently comes back if I look at PAD_IO.
    It won't be real in the layout, it'll be a data format compatibility issue with the viewer or maybe a GL rendering bug.
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