Installation

There are three distinct ways of installing KQCircuits suitable for different use cases.

The simplest way is installing the latest KQCircuits Salt Package with KLayout’s package manager. This gives the user instant access to KQCircuits but in a slightly limited read-only way. See Salt Package Guide.

Developers should rather install git, check out the source code and run KQCircuits from there, see the Developer Setup. This is the most powerful and most complex installation method but it gives full access to everything: creating and modifying chips, running tests and simulations, building documentation, etc.

It is also possible to use KQCircuits with the standalone KLayout Python module, for that see KLayout Standalone Usage.

KLayout

Download and install KLayout from https://www.klayout.de/build.html. Builds should exist there for most common operating systems, choose the correct one for your OS. Otherwise you need to build KLayout yourself. We will assume in these instructions, that KLayout has been installed in the default location.

KLayout is an actively maintained project with regular feature updates, bugfixes and stability improvements. We recommend using the latest version. KQCircuits is automatically tested on the following versions:

  • Linux (Ubuntu 18.04/20.04 LTS, 64-bit): KLayout 0.26.7, 0.26.12, 0.27.13, and the latest version of 0.28

  • MacOS: the latest version of 0.28

  • Windows 10 (64-bit): KLayout 0.26.12, and the latest version of 0.28

Note

KQC documetation uses Linux conventions and examples unless explicitly talking about Windows or MacOS. For example a Windows user should mentally translate path separator / to \, klayout executable klayout to %APPDATA%\KLayout\klayout_app.exe or the KLayout environment directory ~/.klayout to %HOMEPATH%\KLayout.

Known installation issues

For some specific KLayout builds there can be problems with KQCircuits installation that require some extra steps:

  • For some macOS BigSur KLayout builds (at least for KLayout v0.27.x), KQC might not work due to a problem with the KLayout included setuptools package. The KQC libraries will not be visible and one might see the error message "No module named '_distutils_hack'" when trying to run macros. This can be fixed by installing manually the setuptools package into KLayout (at least setuptools v52.0.0 and v57.4.0 should work, probably also some other versions). See Installing different Python package versions to KLayout manually for instructions on how to install a specific package version to KLayout.

Installing different Python package versions to KLayout manually

Sometimes there are issues with specific package versions in the KLayout Python environment. To install a different version of some package, use:

pip install <PACKAGE>==<VERSION> --target=<KLAYOUT-PACKAGE-DIR>

The KLAYOUT-PACKAGE-DIR should be the path to the site-packages directory used by KLayout. If you don’t know where that is, you can find it by opening the KLayout macro editor and writing import pip and then pip.__path__ in the console.