GDS3D / Blog: Recent posts

Our total download count has reached 2500, I would like to thank you all for your support and for accepting GDS3D so massively. Keep spreading the word!

For version 1.9, we mainly have bug fixes in mind. We need your feedback to find them, so keep us informed of any problems you are having.

After a year of major code overhauls, we are proud to release version 1.8 of GDS3D. New features include:
- Net highlighting (tracing)
- Hierarchical topcell window
- Picks highest cell in GDS as topcell (sorry it took so long)
- Native Mac OS client written in Cocoa

The architectural changes in the code were necessary to explicitly separate the OS specific code, and to provide net tracing. We would appreciate it very much to receive feedback, so we can smash any bugs that might come up. Also, don't hesitate to share your experiences in the forum.

We are happy to hear that our project has been received so well. Of course, we keep on improving this software. One of the coolest features we wanted to implement was net highlighting: you click on a wire and the viewer traces the wire so you can see where it goes.

Implementing net highlighting has many challenges and it forced us to make some major code changes. That's why we did a big code cleanup, unifying the geometry pipeline, building a central window manager and separating the different OS-specific code sections.... read more

Version 1.7 of the viewer has just been uploaded. New features include:
- High quality screenshot by pressing F8, screen gets dumped in the gds folder
- Internal geometry flattening -> improved rendering speed
- 32-bit Linux binary with statically compiled C++ libraries

With the geometry flattening, the viewer will now also render GDS files with lots of small sub cells at normal speeds. This also means that you don't have to convert the PCELLs to geometry anymore in the GDS export process.... read more

The "you can always recompile" attitude in Linux communities has always pissed me off. I can understand that Linux comes in many, diverse forms and that providing universal binaries for all platforms is impossible. However, I do believe that for consumer desktops running regular distros under x86 architectures there should be a way to deliver an executable that just runs. In that respect, my experiences with Mac OS have changed my expectations of software's user friendliness.

I encountered one of the more nasty occurences of linking troubles when compiling the GDS3D code on one of our new Linux servers. When trying to run this binary on the older machines, the following cryptic error message appeared:

error while loading shared libraries: requires glibc 2.5 or later dynamic linker

Some googling revealed that this is a common problem, but the solution is not easy to find. For a time I was playing with .symver statements in the C++ code, with negative results.
Then finally, I stumbled on a link that contained exactly what I wanted:

http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~charngda/elf.html

The root of the problem is in the hash section of the binary, which follows a new convention in newer versions of GCC. The default should be compatible with older versions, but a lot of distros overwrite this. Thank you, binutils guys, for breaking something which should have been left alone.

So, what's the fix? Just include the following link flag in your Makefile:

-Wl,--hash-style=both

Of course, this fix will be in the next version of GDS3D, as we strive to minimize the number of dependencies and maximize the compatibility of our compiled binaries.

It is done, version 1.6 of GDS3D with the source code is now available here on SourceForge!

As the excitement from ISSCC 2012 begins to ebb away, it becomes clear that there is some work to do for us. At the conference, we showed the GDS3D program to a lot of people and all in all, reactions were very positive. Early on we had already decided that we would make this software open source and we were further strengthened by all your kind words.

So yes, GDS3D will be Open Source very soon!

Right now, we are testing the latest version on our group servers and hammering out the last bugs. And I must say, this version is SO much more polished than what is currently available on the ICD Group website. We can't wait to share this great software with ic-designers over the whole world to make their lives a bit easier (because it's not that easy at times).