Connectivity Operations in Guardian DRC

Introduction

The article “Connectivity options for DRC spacing check operations in Guardian” (Simulation Standard, vol. 11, no. 12) [1] describes layout netlist connectivity based on DRC checks. Earlier versions of Silvaco Guardian required connectivity before netlist extraction by the Maverick extractor. Maverick often used the Guardian DRC engine in order to generate derived layers for device/connectivity definition. This required a complicated tool setup that consisted of two DRC scripts and an extraction-related technology setup section. Connectivity construction operations have been introduced directly into recent versions of Guardian. This article describes their proper usage.