Caltech Intermediate Format (CIF)

Caltech Intermediate Format (CIF) is a text-file format for the description of integrated circuits. CIF has provided a common database structure for the integration of many research tools. CIF provides a limited set of graphics primitives, and The format allows hierarchical description, which makes the representation concise. In addition, it is a terse but human-readable text format. CIF is therefore a concise and powerful descriptive form for VLSI geometry.

cifread is a work in progress. It started with the program cif2ps, which is a basic C program. The goal is to produce a C++ object-oriented version.

References

Steven M. Rubin, Computer Aids for VLSI Design, electronic publication, 1994. (See Appendix B)

Robert Sproul, Richard Lyon, and Stephen Trimberger, The Caltech Intermediate Form for LSI Layout Description, Technical Report TR-2686, 1980. (pdf)

Maintained by John Loomis, last updated 14 February 2007