RE: Electric for MEMS and Microfluidics

[Luc Gervais]

Hi Steven, thanks for the reply. I think Electric is a great software overall 
and has a lot of potential for MEMS work. I especially like the variety of I/O 
formats. Many masks print shops ask for different layout formats (such as 
GDSII, ps, dxf) and don't have the required conversion tools. Java is wonderful 
as well because that means I can design in Mac OS X.

An additional technology for MEMS work could be implemented, that would help 
tremendously for mask layout. However, what would help the most would be to 
have better capabilities for manipulating polygons and shapes. In the Edit 
Menu, the Rotate, Mirror, Size and Move submenus should all have buttons that 
are in the main window interface. These are the most commonly used functions in 
mask layout and therefore should be just one click away from the user.

When I first loaded a GDSII mask into Electric. I had difficulty seeing my 
layout. There should be buttons that make it easy to show and hide layers. 
Additionally, zooming in and out could be made much easier with a zoom in and 
out button and using the mouse wheel while holding down ctrl.

As a first step, I would suggest looking at other commonly used MEMS softwares. 
LEDIT is the most popular. (  http://www.tanner.com/EDA/index.html ) It is 
quite functional overall but has many design quirks that make it not the 
friendliest and most enjoyable software to use. A very nice commercial layout 
software is Visual Chip Mask ( 
http://www.numericalinnovations.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=27 ). 

Layout Editor ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/layout/ ) is a good open source 
layout software. If you look at the main window, it  has the important features 
I was talking about above. On the left you can select which layers to make 
visible. Above it there is a variety of buttons for making and manipulating 
polygons.

Do you think these features are reasonable? Or would it me more complicated 
than originally expected since Electric is connectivity based?

Great work on the software. I'm happy to see that this is in active development 
and I would gladly be willing to help you on this project.

Luc Gervais
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