Debug Utility for Validation of OASIS Parser

In EDA industry, GDSII format is the IC industry de facto standard for IC layout data exchange. The designs developed may require up to 1 Billion Byte (1TByte) of disk data. This huge amount of Big Data not only slows down the runtimes from design to physical verification but also increases the time to get a design to market. On the other hand, OASIS stream format which is replacement to GDSII is relatively new and is emerging in the industry. The OASIS stream format significantly reduces the data and thereby the tool is much likely to run faster. There hasn’t been significant development in enhancing the robustness of its usage due to lack of in-house test cases. This paper presents an approach to develop a debug utility for OASIS parser validation to increase its robustness. The debug utility is implemented using a Singleton design pattern. The utility essentially enables us to compare the data associated with both the stream formats and highlights the differences. The effective memory utilization of the proposed design is zero since all the structure are dynamically created and destroyed after its use. Iterative and unit testing were performed on the utility and the proposed design was tested with real time test cases to verify its robustness.