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Revision History

This page summarizes the changes, enhancements and fixes to the GDSII & OASIS Hierarchical Extractor.


v3.03 [10/31/2019]

Software Updates




v3.02 [5/10/2016]

Software Updates

Fixed a crash caused by output file paths longer than 150 characters.
Fixed a crash caused when opening a large GDS file.
Re-design of the engine to support a job based execution model to accommodate a wide range of execution control by the client




v2.17 [8/10/2015]

Improve Support for Large Files

This version of HExtract uses the latest QisLib library as its geometry engine and successfully extracts data from much larger GDSII files than the previous version could.

New Cache Generator

A new program, Gds2QckCache, (that also uses QisLib) is included in the release and can be used to generate memory maps for these large GDSII files.




v2.15 [7/24/2015]

Long Cell Name

This version contains a fix for the case where some input GDSII/OASIS files have cell names larger than 127 characters. Previously, this condition could potentially crash the program or lead to unexpected results. Now, cells with names longer than 127 characters will be replaced by short cell names such as Cell1234 where 1234 is a unique cell number.


v2.14 [6/5/2015]

Speed Improvements

This version add further speed improvements for extracting data straight from the home view.


v2.13 [5/29/2015]

Speed Improvements

This version has some improvements that under certian conditions may improve performance and additional information logging for diagnostics.


v2.12 [5/27/2015]

New OASIS Output

This version of HExtract supports OASIS output. There are 2 new command-line options, either one of them can be used to get OASIS output.

  • -oasis
    This option results in an OASIS output file with reasonable compression using modality and indexing. The output file does not carry any CBLOCKs.
  • -oasis+
    This option results in an OASIS output with enhanced compression using CBLOCKs in addition to modality and indexing.


  • If neither of these options are present, the output format defaults to GDSII (same as before)


    v2.07 [7/7/2013]

    Internal Upgrade

    The new version uses the latest QISLIB engine with improved speed and better OASIS support.


    v2.06 [01/20/2012]

    OASIS arrays

    The new version fixes a bug related to processing on OASIS arrays. This version is capable of extracting all types of OASIS arrays and retains the AREF property in the output GDSII whenever possible.




    v2.05 [08/16/2011]

    Speed improvement

    The new HExtract takes advantage of 'traversal pruning' optimization to achieve upto 25x* performance improvement.




    v2.03 [03/28/2011]

    Memory Leak Fixed

    Corrected a memory leak that caused the program to crash when large files were clipped with a round boundary. [reported by Martin Photomask]




    v1.04 [06/7/2010]

    Extraction from memory map for faster processing

    Added support for extracting data from memory maps (load and dbload).

    Cell filter option

    Support for filtering cells based on names or expressions - look at the Examples page for more information.

    gds2qckcache utility

    New Load and DbLoad Cache generator utility (gds2qckcache) included in the package.

    Load file to memory

    Added option to load file to memory for faster performance (applicable only to OASIS, GDSII or QIS DbLoad Memory map/Cache)




    v1.02 [01/26/2010]

    -region command line option

    Added -regions command-line option for extracting multiple overlapping/disjoint windows with(out) hierarchy to the same output GDSII file.

    -complement command line option

    Added -complement command-line option for extracting complement of -window or -regions with(out) hierarchy.

    -flatten command line option

    Added -flatten command-line option for generating flat output.




    v1.01 [09/28/2009]

    Update release

    GDSII&OASIS Hierarchy Extractor first release as standalone command line tool.