Useful commands

Hotkeys

Use the following hotkeys to navigate around, and if not all parts of the geometry are visible:

  • * makes the full cell hierarchy visible. Otherwise only cell frames may be visible. Also accessible from Display -> Full hierarchy in the top menu.

  • F2 zooms to show the full layout (from the current top cell)

  • Shift+F2 zooms to show the currently selected cell

KQCircuits menu

Several very useful macros are directly accessible from KLayout’s “KQCircuits” drop-down menu:

  • Fill with ground plane grid – Creates a ground plane grid covering the top cell bounding box, except the parts in grid avoidance layer. Requires at least one cell to exist in the current layout. Only creates the grid for “1t1”-face. Remember to unhide the 1t1_ground_grid layer to make it visible.

  • All chips in the library – Opens a new layout and puts all available chips there arranged in a grid. Note that this operation may take several minutes.

  • Empty layout with a top cell and default layers – A new layout in KLayout is empty and has no assigned layers by default. This macro helps to create a more useful new layout with a predefined top-cell and the default KQCircuits layers.

  • Reload libraries – Reloads KQCircuits code from storage making it possible to modify elements and see the change without having to restart KLayout and reload the edited elements. This is illustrated in the end of previous section’s video. Note that this macro does not reload the KQCircuits defaults file.

DRC scripts are accessible from KLayout’s “Tools -> DRC drop-down menu:

  • Area and Density – Calculate area and density for everything in view, in every layer.

  • Waveguide – Detects Waveguides crossing anything in base_metal_gap_wo_grid layer.