Workflow

You’ll need 2 windows:

1. A text editor or IDE (Visual Studio Code, Pycharm, Spyder, neovim, Atom, Jupyterlab ...)
2. Klayout to Visualize the GDS files. With the klive klayout package for showing GDS files when you run. Tools -> Manage Packages Component.show()

1. Standard Python flow¶

1. You write your PCells in python.
2. You execute the python code.
3. You visualize the GDS Layout in Klayout.

The standard python flow can leverage all machine learning tools such as Jupyter notebooks.

2. File-watcher flow¶

For building large components can use a file-watcher and see your updates in KLayout.

1. You execute the file watcher gf watch FolderName or in the current working directory gf watch
2. The file-watcher re-runs any python file .py or YAML .pic.yaml.
3. Thanks to the cell cache you can see your new component changes live updating the layout in Klayout.

3. Webapp flow¶

You can also use a webapp to:

• visualize your PDK components and change the Parametric Cell (PCell) settings.
• visualize the GDS layout of the last saved files in a particular directory.
• turn on a file watcher and watch changing files in specific folders.

To run the webapp you can just run gf webapp in the terminal. By default it will use the generic_pdk technology.

To use a different PDK you can use the --pdk flag. For example gf webapp --pdk ubcpdk.