July 29th, 2025 Beyond Tapeout: Opening the Dark Side of Mask Data Preparation How XYALIS Bridges the Critical Automation Gap from Design to Manufacturing Abstract The transition from design completion (tapeout) to chip fabrication is often presented as seamless, almost magical. However, this perception overlooks a critical reality: a physical mask set must first be manufactured to transfer the layout image onto silicon. Mask data preparation (MDP) remains...
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June 10th, 2018 Layout Database File Control: The Missing Link By Dr Philippe Morey-Chaisemartin & Frederic Brault XYALIS, France. Published in TechDesign Forum – May 31st 2018 As the exchange of layout descriptions between teams involved in modern integrated circuit (IC) development and production increase in terms of rate, value and size, the need for control and reliability increases as well. While regular integrity control...
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June 4th, 2015 Is it time to switch to OASIS.MASK ? By Dr Philippe Morey-Chaisemartin & Frederic Brault XYALIS, France. A summary of OASIS ® standard advantages and weaknesses is presented, based on six years of experience with customer databases. A new standard, OASIS.MASK, is being introduced to address the requirements specific to photomask layout representation. This subset of OASIS ® (and as such fully OASIS ® compliant) introduces constraints...
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October 29th, 2012 Highlights of XYALIS tools in Kalray design flow Context Kalray, a French startup has developed an advanced array processor including 256 cores. This chip has been designed using TSMC 28nm process. Combining huge designs with complex process rules as lead to a bottleneck regarding layout finishing. Typically, dummies generation became a real issue as the final database includes both analog parts, which require...
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August 1st, 2008 From GDSII to OASIS 1 Why switching to OASIS ® ? It’s a banality to say that nowadays, databases for digital chips are more than huge. The physical description of an SOC, encoded in the classical GDSII format, now often goes over 20Gbytes. Files of up to 200Gbytes have been reported by mask houses. Even if storage systems and data...
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