vyges-gds-view

Headless GDS layout viewer: a laid-out GDS in, a single self-contained SVG out — every shape coloured by its layer, with an optional violation overlay that boxes exactly where another engine flagged a problem.

Vyges open EDA tools. Commercial-grade silicon sign-off capability, built on open standards and plain file formats — and meant to be accessible to everyone, not only teams who can license a six-figure tool. vyges-gds-view makes the geometry visible.

Stability: experimental (v0.1.0). Real flatten-and-render with a violation overlay; this is a look at it aid, not an interactive layout editor — see Current state for what is and isn't there.

Why this exists

vyges-drc and vyges-lvs tell you what is wrong with a layout. They don't show you where. vyges-gds-view closes that loop: render the GDS, drop the violation coordinates on top, and open the result in any browser — or commit it to a report, or diff it in CI. No X server, no GUI toolkit, no install beyond the binary.

It's the visual companion to the geometry engines, riding the same vyges-layout GDS/geometry kernel they do — one toolset, one language.

How this is solved today

Looking at a layout today means KLayout or Magic — capable GUIs, but a running display, a heavy install, and Tcl/Ruby/C++ to script. There is no small, embeddable "GDS to a picture, headless" step you can wire into a flow. vyges-gds-view is that step: pure Rust, std-only beyond the shared kernel, output is plain SVG text.

Use it

cargo build --release

vyges-gds-view demo -o demo.svg                                  # built-in sample layout
vyges-gds-view render block.gds -o block.svg                     # flatten top cell -> SVG
vyges-gds-view render block.gds --top mycell --layers 66,68      # pick cell + restrict layers
vyges-gds-view render block.gds --marks viols.txt -o block.svg   # overlay violation boxes
# flags: --top CELL · --layers LIST · --marks FILE · -o FILE · -h · -V

The marks file is one violation per line — the trivial format any engine can emit (# starts a comment):

# x0 y0 x1 y1  label   (GDS db units)
120 0 200 80   space < min
40 200 360 240 width < min

So a DRC-then-look pass is two commands and a one-line glue: run vyges-drc, turn its violations into x0 y0 x1 y1 label lines, and render --marks them onto the layout.

How it works

• Flatten the chosen top cell through vyges-layout (SREF/AREF expanded).
• Fit the design bounding box into a fixed pixel canvas, aspect preserved, the Y axis flipped so up is up.
• Draw each Boundary/Box as a translucent filled polygon and each Path as a stroked polyline, coloured from a fixed palette indexed by GDS layer number; a legend lists the layers present.
• Overlay each mark as a red outline box (with its label) on top — the where.

Current state (v0.1.0)

Working & tested: flatten + render of Boundary / Box / Path geometry, the per-layer palette and legend, a --layers filter, the --marks violation overlay (reversed corners normalized, labels escaped), and an empty cell still produces valid SVG. A demo subcommand renders a built-in layout with no input.

Depth reserved (honest):

• always renders a flattened top cell — per-instance / hierarchical views are a follow-up;
• datatype is not yet part of the colour key (layer number only); a named layer-map (layer/datatype to name + colour, à la a KLayout layer properties file) is the next step;
• consumes violations as the simple marks text format — reading a vyges-drc (or -lvs, -extract) JSON report directly is the follow-up once those reports carry coordinates;
• raster (PNG) output and any interactivity are out of scope — SVG only, by design.

Validation roadmap: render representative open-PDK blocks (sky130, gf180) and eyeball against KLayout — the same layout the rest of Loom already reads.