CleWin

CleWin

 

 

WieWeb software’s main product is the layout editor CleWin. CleWin is a layout editor we designed in cooperation with the MESA+ Research Institute at the University of Twente and Deltamask, a mask making company. Since we started with the development of CleWin, more than 20 years ago, the product has evolved from a simple editor to a powerful mask design tool. The product has been very successful over the years and is used worldwide in 35 countries at hundreds of companies and universities.

 

CleWin runs on a PC with Windows 7 or higher. It is compatible with other layout software since it uses the standard CIF, GDS-II and OASIS file formats. Furthermore, CleWin can read and write the AutoCAD DXF format. High resolution (Encapsulated) PostScript is available as output format. Bitmap files can be easily imported using the separate bitmap import utility.

 

Because CleWin is also meant to be used by students a lot of attention is given to the user interface. CleWin is a hierarchical layout editor, i.e. a layout consists of “symbols” (also called “cells”) which may be nested. Editing a symbol in one place will change all other instances of the same symbol. CleWin shows a hierarchical list of all symbols in a design, so that each symbol definition is directly accessible for editing. Furthermore, the hierarchical list provides a clear overview of the file structure and the dependencies between the defined symbols.

 

In version 4, a powerful scripting engine was added, that allows the generation of objects using four different languages: C, Matlab, the MaskEngineer language and Lua. Support for Python scripts was added in version 5.4 of CleWin. Scripts are especially useful for complex, parametric designs, but also for relatively simple tasks like automatic numbering of chips.

 

 

New features in CleWin 5

 

The most important improvements in version 5 of CleWin include:

• Drawings of designs on the screen is made much faster.
• Define and store 10 grid settings and activate these grids by pressing one of the numerical keys ‘0’…’9′. There is also the possibility, besides the grid size, of changing the color of the grid and choosing between dots, small crosses and large crosses.
• When editing a symbol definition, CleWin5 can now show the contents of parent and neighboring symbols semi-transparently in the background. This is CleWin’s better alternative to in-place editing. Symbol definitions are edited in their local coordinate system and the inverse transformation is applied to the parent and neighboring symbols in order to connect to easily align other symbols.
• New primitive objects are added: ‘Trapezoids’, ‘Regular polygons’ and ‘Circular arcs’.
• An unlimited ‘Redo’ command was added to the existing ‘Undo’ functionality.
• Panning of the window is now possible in all edit modes by using the right mouse button. In version 4 this only was possible in the ‘Zoom’ mode. Furthermore, because of the faster rendering, the entire image now moves while panning.
• The arrow keys can be used to pan the visible area, while drawing or editing objects.
• The resolution has changed from 1 nanometer to 1 picometer. The earlier limit of 1 nanometer was due to an internal representation of coordinate value by 32-bit numbers.
• The boolean operations ‘Merge’, ‘Intersect’, ‘XOR’ and ‘Subtract’ can also be used as drawing mode, i.e. while drawing new objects those are directly combined with objects that are already present.
• The ‘Duplicate’ command can now generate regular arrays, duplicate along the circumference of a circle and duplicate along a straight line.
• Align commands were added to align objects with respect to each other.
• Most dialogs for editing object properties are improved (e.g. for rectangles it is now possible to choose between entering two opposite corners or entering one node and the rectangle’s width and height).
• Selection of colors and fonts has been simplified.
• A ‘Maximize work area’ command has been added to allow full screen operation of CleWin.

 

With CleWin version 5.3 a fully 64-bit version of the program was introduced. Furthermore, rendering to the screen has been redesigned and now uses parallel threads to fully exploit the potential of modern processors with multiple cores. In version 5.4 Python was added as scripting language.