Open Artwork System Interchange Standard

Open Artwork System Interchange Standard (OASIS[3]) is a binary file format used for specification of data structures for photomask production.

[5] OASIS is the purported commercial successor to the integrated circuit design and manufacturing electronic pattern layout language, GDSII.

GDSII was created in the 1970s when integrated circuit designs had a few hundred thousand geometric shapes, properties and placements to manage.

File sizes of GDSII format often takes tens of gigabytes of storage and are difficult to store and process.

Its adoption was born of a concerted effort by integrated circuit design, equipment, photomask, fabless, 3rd party Intellectual Property (IP) and manufacturing companies from the United States, Japan, Taiwan, Korea and Europe.

A constrained version of OASIS, called OASIS.MASK, addresses the unique needs of semiconductor photomask manufacturing equipment such as pattern generators and inspection systems.

Below is a human-readable text representation of the OASIS binary file that allowed the expression of the above "top" cell view called "Placed_shapes_and_cells_within_an_IC_cell".

Other OASIS-supported geometric shapes having the record types POLYGON, TRAPEZOID, CTRAPEZOID, CIRCLE and PATH are defined by different bit patterns.

Each layer-number that had been assigned to a geometric shape has an association with a LAYERNAME record that defines a layer-interval and a layername-string.

The objective was to give the interested reader a general understanding of the scope of the OASIS language and how it applies to the representation and the expression of the electronic layout patterns that define an integrated circuit.

This view is called a cell view. A cell can be a collection of placed geometric shapes. It also can be a collection of cells; each containing other cells and/or geometric shapes. Each cell must have at least one layer. In this view, each color represents a different layer within the cell. An integrated circuit can contain tens of thousands of unique cells and repeated instances of the same cell.