I have used "Electric" CAD to generate both CIF and GDS for ACES.

(Electric comes from: http://www.staticfreesoft.com/index.html)
(ACES from http://mass.micro.uiuc.edu/research/completed/aces/pages/home.html)

It's a while since I last touched it, so I can't give specific details but
there are a few things that I vaguely remember:

ACES appears to treat CIF and GDS slightly differently.

It doesn't like very fancy polygons (it seemed to prefer several
overlapping rectangles rather than a single polygon, although if follow the
next point it is happier).

Make sure you close your polygons (put a final point on top of the starting
point - ACEs seems to like this).

These may have been pecularities of my set-up.

Danny.



At 10:43 30/07/2002 -0700, you wrote:
>You can generate masks for ACES simulations using AutoCad as follows:
>
>Make sure you set the drawing background in AutoCad to white.  Draw your
>mask, using "solid" regions in black, then export the drawing as a bitmap.
>
>Roger Shile
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Luiz Marangoni [mailto:memstechbr@yahoo.com.br]
>Sent: Monday, July 29, 2002 5:15 PM
>To: MEMS Talk List
>Subject: [mems-talk] Masks for ACES simulations
>
>
>Hello folks,
>
>I4m starting to use ACES (Anisotropic Etch Simulator) to simulate some
>structures but I didn4t find a (good) way to generate the masks to use in
>the simulations.
>I4m using FreeHand (a vetorial editor) to generate the masks and to export
>in BMP format, but I4m facing some ems with this procedure (distortion of
>the dimensions).
>Someone know some way to use AutoCad or LASI to generate the masks or have
>used the CIF or GDS formats in ACES simulations?
>Thanks in advance,
>
>Luiz Marangoni
>UNICAMP - Campinas - Brazil

--
Danny Banks
danny@dbanks.demon.co.uk
http://www.dbanks.demon.co.uk/