General standards

Overview

General standards are intended to cover methods which may be used in EPDA for multiple purposes. They include data format, format for analytic expressions and vocabulary of standard terms.

openEPDA data format

The data is the core of the EPDA. The data may be numeric or analytic, tabular or scalar, may originate from measurements, analysis, or physical simulations, and may include metadata. The data format we standardize on is a serialization format which allows representing all of these in a similar form.

The format is used to represent e.g. building block performance data in the PDK (both in tabular numeric form and as compact models), measurement data resulting from a PIC testing / characterization, etc.

See more details on openEPDA data format.

Analytic expression format

In many cases, coordinates, sizes, locations, and other numeric values can be represented as real numbers. However, often an analytic expression which is evaluated at runtime is more convenient. openEPDA defines a standardized analytic expression format, which can be used anywhere where a numeric value is expected.

Example use cases are parametric building blocks (positions of it’s pins may be functions of the length / width), compact models for building block performance (i.e. functional dependencies instead of tabulated numeric values).

See more details on Analytic Expression Format.

Vocabulary of standard terms

Most of the data files in the EPDA are represented as sets of attribute-value pairs. The vocabulary defines a list of the standard attributes, with their meaning, allowed value type, dimensionality, etc.

The vocabulary is currently under development.