Developer Setup¶

Prerequisites¶

First install KLayout.

Developer setup may be done independently from the GUI based installation of the KQCircuits Salt package. But you should not do both without removing the other one. Otherwise there will be duplicate macros and possibly other problems.

Python¶

KQCircuits installation requires Python 3, which should be already installed on Linux. On Windows you may have to install it. If your Python installation does not already contain the pip package manager, you have to also install that.

Successfully tested versions:

Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04 LTS with Python 3.6.9 and Python 3.8.5
Windows: Python 3.7.6, 3.8.5

Sources¶

Get KQCircuits’ sources with:

git clone https://github.com/iqm-finland/KQCircuits

Alternatively, you may re-use the Salt package itself for quick tests, it is under the .klayout/salt/KQCircuits directory. In this case creating symbolic links or installing some dependencies may not be required. Beware, a Salt package update will overwrite your code in this directory without any warning!

Install¶

This section explains basic installation, where the required packages are automatically installed in the default locations where KLayout looks for them. If you want to have more control over the installation process, see the next section.

Open a command line / terminal and cd to your KQCircuits folder. In Windows you must open the terminal with administrator privileges. Then write:

python3 setup_within_klayout.py

to install KQC. You may have to write python or py instead of python3 depending on your OS and Python installation, just make sure that the command refers to Python 3.

If your Python installation does not already contain the pip package manager, you have to also install that too.

Note, that KLayout will run macros with it’s own Python version, ignoring virtualenv settings. KLayout is linked together with libpython*.so on Linux and libpython*.dll on Windows.

Note

If KQCircuits is not working properly after installation (KQC libraries not visible, running any macro gives an error, etc.), there might be some problem with the specific KLayout version/build you are using, see Known installation issues section for possible solutions.

Secondary install¶

Warning

Don’t do it, unless you really need multiple parallel environments.

It is possible to work with several independent KQC instances simultaneously. You only need to check out KQCircuits under some different name:

git clone https://github.com/iqm-finland/KQCircuits KQC_2nd

KLayout needs to know about this secondary environment, run it with startkl.py or by manualy setting the environment variable KLAYOUT_HOME:

KLAYOUT_HOME=~/.klayout_alt/KQC_2nd klayout

Remember to set up a new venv before attempting KLayout Standalone Usage in this directory. Otherwise your secondary environment may get mixed up with the primary one.

Manual installation¶

To use KQCircuits in KLayout Editor, symlinks must be created from KLayout’s python folder to your KQCircuits folder. Some Python packages must also be installed for KQCircuits to work. The details of these steps for different operating systems are explained in the following subsections. The script setup_within_klayout.py used in the previous section attempts to automatically do the same steps as explained below.

Linux or MacOS¶

Create a symlink from KLayout to the kqcircuits package and scripts:

ln -s /Path_to_KQCircuits/klayout_package/python/kqcircuits ~/.klayout/python/kqcircuits
ln -s /Path_to_KQCircuits/klayout_package/python/scripts ~/.klayout/python/kqcircuits_scripts

To install the required packages, open a terminal in your KQCircuits folder (which contains requirements_within_klayout_unix.txt), and write:

pip3 install -r requirements_within_klayout_unix.txt

The previous command installs the packages to your system’s default Python environment, because that is where KLayout looks for the packages on Linux. If you want to install the packages in a separate environment instead, you have to create a symlink to there.

Windows¶

Create a symlink from KLayout to kqcircuits by opening a command prompt with administrator privileges, and do:

cd %HOMEPATH%\KLayout\klayout_package\python
mklink /D 'kqcircuits' "Path_to_KQCircuits\klayout_package\python\kqcircuits"
mklink /D 'kqcircuits_scripts' "Path_to_KQCircuits\klayout_package\python\scripts"

Install the required packages by opening command prompt in your KQCircuits folder (which contains requirements_within_klayout_windows.txt), and writing:

pip install -r requirements_within_klayout_windows.txt --target=%HOMEPATH%\AppData\Roaming\KLayout\lib\python3.7\site-packages

The previous command installs the packages to KLayout’s embedded Python environment, which is where KLayout looks for packages on Windows. If you want to install the packages in another environment instead, you have to create a symlink to there.

Some packages, like numpy, must be compiled on the same compiler as the embedded Python in KLayout. Since KLayout 0.26.2, a correct version of numpy is already included with KLayout, so this shouldn’t be a problem.