KLIC is merely a user, and does not sell or support LEDIT! Contact Tanner for more information!
KLIC does cell, block, and whole chip layout using LEDIT by Tanner Research of Pasadena, CA. Like its major competitor ICED, LEDIT can handle layouts of large chips and produce outputs in the industry standard formats of CIF and GDSII. LEDIT has an optional DRC feature, which KLIC uses for cell-level design rule checks. Tanner also offers a layout extraction tool and a place-and-route tool, which KLIC has not found useful.
Many clients ask whether to buy LEDIT or ICED. LEDIT and ICED have different strengths.
ICED has an "autocad"-like interface, and can be driven by text script files to do quite powerful editing, automatically. Cells are treated as separate files, which can be handy when working with libraries. The ICED DRC feature is very powerful, and much faster than LEDIT.
LEDIT has a "Macintosh"-like interface. As on the Macintosh, the user must do almost everything with the mouse. The cells, the DRC rules, the layers, and everything else are combined into one huge binary file. The DRC is limited and much slower than ICED. However ... the LEDIT interface is much more intuitive, and requires fewer strokes to enter cells. LEDIT offers more control over the appearance of the drawing, and besides the drag-down menus, the menu is modeless. This means that the user can concentrate on the cell, not the tool.
LEDIT supports Postscript printers, which ICED does not. This is important for KLIC documentation, though the plots LEDIT produces with Postscript are inferior to other types of plots, because of the way Postcript does opaque layering.
Tanner is continuously developing LEDIT, and the LEDIT team is a lot better for telephone support. In time, Tanner should be able to enhance LEDIT beyond the features of ICED, so LEDIT was chosen for KLIC's main layout tool.
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