Developer GUI Setup

With the KQCircuits developer GUI setup, you will have many visual and interactive KQCircuits features available when you launch the KLayout GUI application, such as previewing the KQCircuits element and chip libraries, studying how changing PCell parameters affect the element design and manually routing waveguides on your chip. In addition to enabling all features you would get from installing KQCircuits Salt package - with the developer setup, any change you make in cloned KQCircuits code will take effect after KLayout application is restarted or Reload Libraries action is run. In this setup you can amend or create new KQCircuits features which you are welcome to share with us!

The Developer GUI setup will not enable some KQCircuits features that work best when executed from a terminal - for example generating mask sets or exporting and executing simulations are enabled with Developer Standalone module Setup. In standalone setup you will also get access to KQCircuits as a python library, which you can import into your own codebase.

Prerequisites

First go through Installing KLayout. Please also verify that your python version is in order.

If using existing KLayout installation which has KQCircuits Salt package installed, we recommend to remove such package from the Salt package manager. Two concurrent GUI setups may lead to many problems such as duplicate macros etc.

Sources

Get KQCircuits’ sources (if you haven’t already) with:

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

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 section Manual installation.

Open a command line / terminal and cd to your KQCircuits folder. 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.

Unlinking

Installation command links your KQCircuits installation with your KLayout installation automatically. If you wish to unlink, then write in your terminal:

python3 setup_within_klayout.py --unlink

Update

In most cases, after KQCircuits code has been modified (either with git pull or by manually changing the code), it is enough to restart the KLayout application or to run the Reload Libraries action.

If a requirement library has been added, or its version updated in klayout_package/python/requirements/linux/gui-requirements.txt, further action may be required. KLayout will compare dependencies it detected in its system with the contents of this file, and ask the user to upgrade (or downgrade) the requirements. It is recommended to click Yes, and it may require another KLayout restart for requirement upgrades to take effect. You can also run setup_within_klayout.py again to manually prompt the requirement upgrade.

Note

If a new version of KQCircuits has stopped using a certain Python dependency that will not be removed automatically. The user has to remove that manually if it causes any problem.

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, for example:

KLAYOUT_HOME=~/.klayout_alt/KQC_2nd klayout

Remember to set up a new venv before attempting Developer Standalone module Setup 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 (dependencies) 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.

Symlinks in 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
ln -s /Path_to_KQCircuits/klayout_package/python/requirements ~/.klayout/python/kqcircuits_requirements

Symlinks in Windows

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

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

(In PowerShell replace the first line by cd ~\KLayout\python)

Installing dependencies

Usually launching KLayout after setting up symlinks will install dependencies for you, just click Yes on the prompt and maybe restart KLayout again for changes to take effect. If this won’t help, please refer to Installing different Python package versions to KLayout manually. Instead of installing each package individually, try installing them in bulk, by replacing the <PACKAGE>==<VERSION> part of the pip command with -r klayout_package/python/requirements/<OS>/gui-requirements.txt, <OS> being either win, mac or linux.