LASI (LAyout System for
Individuals) is a "general purpose" layout and
design system originally intended for integrated circuits. It is
versatile enough that it can be used for ICs, MEMS, discrete
devices, schematics, PC
boards and project documentation drawings. LASI is a "precision"
drawing system where figures are always precisely located. LASI is intended for both educational and professional
use.
For students LASI teaches a better understanding of
what you are really doing. To use LASI, you need to know something
about your technology, the physics involved and have some circuit
intuition, not just know how to run
software. It is for people who still consider IC design something of
an art.
A very simple
version of LASI was
written for MS-DOS in the mid-80's by the author to be used for
his own IC design. When Windows 95 came out, LASI was rewritten
as version 6 for Windows. The current version 7 is more elegant, functional and
runs on all Windows versions.
The original intention of LASI
was to aid commercial design systems. It still has that
purpose since layout work can be done on any Windows PC or Laptop, on Linux
systems using Wine, and then be transferred
using common formats such as GDS.
LASI also runs portably. You
can install the system on a flash drive or other removable drive and
work directly on any layouts you might have on the drive. Portable
operation lets you run on a PC without leaving data on that PC. This is
handy for presentations.
Drawings are built from
hierarchical cells stored as individual TLC (Transportable Layout Cells)
files. TLC files can be easily traded between different drawings. TLC
files are in XML or optionally the original text format.
LASI consists of a main drawing editor program and several
"utility" programs. These utilities include GDS, CIF
and DXF format converters, a user programmable bitmap based DRC, a basic
matrix router, and a Spice netlist compiler that extracts Spice circuit files
from both schematic and layout and can do an LVS compare. The utilities
can run independently or
directly out of the editor.
LASI compiles Spice net files but does not do simulations. There are good Spice simulators available already. Most simulators can run directly out of the main editor or
the Spice compile utility.
Although fairly well developed
by now, LASI is still an ongoing project. There is always something that
you can add, improve or fix. Watch this site for
the latest version,
approximately every month or two.
