• Top left pane has Recent Projects, Scan Directories, and New Project tabs.
• Bottom pane shows the project notes that were added to the project when it was created.
• The right pane shows the Project Tree, each node correspond to the file that the project includes.
• The large action button on the bottom of the form tells what operation can be performed on the selected project.

The Recent Projects tab shows the last 10 projects that were opened. Click on the project to select it and display the information about it. Double clicking on the project or pushing the action button opens the selected project.

WARNING: Opening a new project will close currently active project and all open Layout windows, opening a Save dialog if the project was modified.

Check the box Include Subdirectories if you want the search to descend in to the subdirectories. The found projects files are displayed in the top window.

You can enter the name of the new project in the top edit box. Add Files and Remove Files buttons allow you to add or remove files from the project. Files on disk are neither created nor deleted during these operations. You also must choose the temporary directory where GdsViewer will keep its caches. Caches can be deleted at any time and GdsViewer will rebuild them as necessary. You can add project notes in the Notes window to identify your project.

When you press the bottom action button, the project will be created and opened in the Project Manager

The left pane of Project Manager shows files included in the project. You can add any type of files to the project. GDSII files, both binary and ASCII, are automatically recognized independently of the file extension. Unloaded GDSII files are assigned grayed icons. When GDSII file is being loaded, its icon is flashing. The icon stops flashing as soon as the file is loaded, which is also indicated by a short beep sound.

GDSII files are loaded in the background threads allowing you to continue working on the other files. Loading multiple files will be automatically scheduled on multiple processors when available.

In order to open a GDSII file node, you can click open selected button, or double click on the corresponding node, or right click on the node and choose the action from pop-up menu.

You can import/export layer assignments to/from GDSII file by clicking corresponding button. This saves time when loading multiple GDSII files based on the same technology.

When a non-GDSII file is being opened, the associated with that file type application is started. This allows adding supplemental information to the GdsViewer project.

You can also add or remove files in the Project Manager, change temporary directory or project notes, save the changes, or open another project.

Selecting a node in the Project Manager tree and clicking right mouse button brings up a pop-up menu with available actions for that node.

When GDSII file node is selected, the right pane contains the information found in the file. The layer list in the bottom window contains the properties of all the layers found in the GDSII file. The index column contains two numbers, the first corresponding to the layer number and the second -- to the data-type. User can change the layer name, outline color, style, z-axis top and bottom values for layer by clicking on the corresponding cells in the layer list. Z coordinates are specified in microns and used for 3D visualization.

The layer assignments can be exported and imported using corresponding Project Manager buttons.

You will need to save the project in order for the changes to be preserved.

Selected cells can be opened in the Layout Window by pressing open selected button, double clicking the cell node, or choosing Open Cell(s) from pop-up menu.

The action bar contains the following buttons:

• Print - opens print dialog and sends the design as displayed in the Layout Window to the printer.
• Export image - export current view to a bitmap or JPEG picture file.
• Copy to Clipboard - copy current view to Windows Clipboard.
• Previous and Next - two buttons which navigate to the previous or the next view.
• Fit - scale the design view to fit the screen.
• Zoom In/Out - two buttons that zoom the current view, keeping the center at the same position on the screen.
• Zoom rectangle - use left mouse button to select a rectangle on the layout to zoom in. This button has memory. To unselect it, press it again or click another button with memory.
• Select area - this button allows selecting shapes in rectangular area. Selected shapes are outlined with red color and listed in the Messages window. This button has memory.
• Pan - this button allows repositioning the view so that the click position becomes the new center. This button has memory.
• Three fill buttons - choose to fill the shapes with selected patterns, solid colors, or show only outlines.
• Invert Colors - this button inverts all colors.
• Redraw - this button allows redrawing the layout window when necessary.
• Hierarchical Depth - change the depth of the hierarchy that you want to flatten to. If the cell doesn't have other cells instances this control is disabled. Flattening is a CPU intensive operation.

Two blue buttons Hide/Show InfoPane allow hiding or restoring the InfoPane.

If Count shapes on layers box is checked, the hint shows the number of rectangles and polygons when the mouse pointer hovers over the image. The counted numbers correspond to the current Hierarchical Depth setting. The rectangles that were rotated are counted as rectangles not as polygons. Counting shapes in a flattened design is a CPU intensive operation.

If the Make new layers visible box is checked, then when new layers appear during hierarchy flattening they are automatically made visible.

The check-boxes under each layer thumbnail image allow turning on or off the visibility of the layer and blinking property. The blinking property has no effect on invisible layers.

The three buttons on the left allow making changes to all layers at once, which is a faster operation than changing layers one by one.

You can edit tag name and coordinates in the tag list by selecting the corresponding fields in the tag list. Selecting a tag and clicking on the right mouse button (or using Popup Menu button on your keyboard) brings up the tag menu. The tag menu allows navigating to the selected tag, deleting it, or deleting all tags.

Shapes are listed this way:

• rectangles are represented by their four corner coordinates: (Left Bottom, Right Top). The width and height are also listed.
• polygons are represented by the list of points: {p1x p1y, p2x p2y, ...}. The bounding boxes with their widths and heights are also listed.

Distances and coordinates are shown in DBUs.

The popup menu, invoked by clicking the right mouse button, allows clearing or saving the messages.

You can select and copy (Ctrl-C) the messages and paste them to another application.

• Selection: specifies the maximum number of rectangles and polygons for selection command and Size Filter. Listing shapes in Messages window is a relatively slow operation, so don't set the maximum too high.
• Cells: choose whether to show the bounding boxes for the instances and cell names, and choose the cell font.
• Text: choose whether to show the text and choose the display and print fonts.
• Grid: choose whether to show the grid and choose grid parameters.
• Drawing: choose between drawing speed and resolution.

Under Select location you can specify a new location in X and Y fields (in DBUs) and push Go To button to move the center of the design view to the specified location. When the specified coordinates are outside of the bounding box of the open cell the Go To button is disabled. This operation doesn't change current zoom level.

Find Text provides facilities for searching for GDSII text in the top cell. Find First, Find Next, Find Previous buttons start searching for the text and, when found, enter X and Y coordinates to the corresponding Select Location fields.

In Measurements section you can select to show data in DBU (dbu), nanometers (nm), microns (µm), or millimeters (mm). The same units are applied to the XY information in the Status Bar.

Unlike tags, markers are not saved in the project file and each layout window has independent set of two markers.

Open Compare tab and choose the raster operation to be performed. The raster operations are performed on pixel level, so in order to clearly see the differences it is better to have the layers defined with the same colors and styles.

You can choose whether to include rectangles, polygons, and text to the exported file. The source can be either the current window or a selection rectangle. A red dotted blinking rectangle shows the exported area. If the clip by grid lines option is checked the exported shapes are clipped.

3D tab provides facilities for exporting a flattened piece of the design to 3D VTK file (see vtk.org^*) To view this file you will need a VTK compatible 3D viewer, for example, ParaView (see paraview.org^*)

You need to choose the output file name and maximum number of polygons per layer to be exported. The source can be either the current window or a selection rectangle. A red dotted blinking rectangle shows the exported area.

The bottom and top of each exported layer should be specified in the layer list in the Project Manager (see GDSII file information)

^* Links are provided for information purposes only.

When you move the mouse cursor over the center points of the resistors or capacitors, the value of that element and the node names are displayed on the right side of the RC Extraction panel.

On the left side of the RC Extraction panel you can find check and selection boxes that allow turning on or off the visibility of the resistors and capacitors and changing their color. You can also filter out the capacitors with the values less than the specified threshold.

Clicking on Start Extractor button launches a separate process with specified extractor tool. At the end of the process the log file can be viewed by opening Log page. The log file is assumed to have the same name as the configuration file with ".log" extension.

You will be presented with standard Windows Print dialog, where you can choose the printer options provided by the printer driver. After choosing options press OK button. At this point GdsViewer opens Print Parameters dialog which gives you a choice of print resolution. You can print with the screen resolution or with the native resolution of the printer. There is no limit on the print size, but large prints may take significant time to spool and print. On the other hand printing with the screen resolution is fast and the printout look is very close to the image on the screen.

When printing with native printer resolution, the font substitution for text takes place. The high resolution print font can be selected in the Preferences window.

Most printers provide lower color pixel resolution than their pixel rating. That means that pixel-wide color lines will look faint. To have a crisp high resolution print it is recommended that you choose black color for shapes outlines in the layer list (see GDSII file information)

Hint: would you rather prefer exporting layout window to the other formats (e.g. pdf, postscript, etc) you can install one of available converting print drivers that write to the corresponding file format using print command.

• I opened my GDSII cell but the Layout Window shows no shapes - There can be several reasons for that. Firstly, check that the hierarchy depth selector contains the correct level of flattening. When design is first opened, it shows the top level with no flattening performed. Secondly, if the design contains only sparsely placed very small shapes, they might be filtered out on high zoom levels. Switching to "prefer detail" setting in Preferences tab can make those shapes visible. You can also use selection tool and set selection "Size filter" to "no filter" to highlight any however small shapes at any zoom levels.
• I don't see any text in opened design - Sometimes text labels come on the same layers as the other geometry, sometimes they appear on separate layers. Check that the text layers have "visible" box checked. Apart from that, the appearance of text labels is controlled by "Text" section in Preferences tab. The text color is always the same as the layer outline color.
• When I use "Compare cells" function, I cannot change hierarchy flattening depth - Comparison tool uses the first cell as reference, change the order in which you select the cells in the "Project Manager" and then use "Compare cells" pop-up menu command.
• When I choose high resolution printing, I see very faint printout - Most printers deliver high resolution only for primary colors, select primary colors (black usually works best) for layer outlines in "Project Manager".
• Why "Count shapes on layers" box is not enabled by default? - Counting shapes may take considerable time, which often isn't required.
• I opened DSPF file without errors, but I cannot see any nets - The subcircuit name in DSPF file should be the same as the opened gds cell, otherwise the subcircuit is ignored.