integrated circuit design Integrated circuit design, semiconductor design, chip design or IC design, is a sub-field of electronics engineering, encompassing the particular Boolean logic, logic and circuit design techniques required to design integrated circuits (ICs). A ...

, Library Exchange Format (LEF) is a specification for representing the physical layout of an

integrated circuit An integrated circuit (IC), also known as a microchip or simply chip, is a set of electronic circuits, consisting of various electronic components (such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors) and their interconnections. These components a ...

in an

ASCII ASCII ( ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English language focused) printable character, printable and 33 control character, control c ...

format. It includes design rules and abstract information about the

standard cell In semiconductor design, standard-cell methodology is a method of designing application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) with mostly digital-logic features. Standard-cell methodology is an example of design abstraction, whereby a low-level ...

s. LEF only has the basic information required at that level to serve the purpose of the concerned CAD tool. It helps in saving valuable resources by providing only an abstract view and thus consuming less memory overhead. LEF is used in conjunction with

Design Exchange Format {{about, the specification for representing a circuit, the CAD data file format, AutoCAD DXF Design Exchange Format (DEF) is an open specification for representing physical layout of an integrated circuit in an ASCII format. It represents the n ...

(DEF) to represent the complete physical layout of an

while it is being designed. LEF originated by Tangent for their Place and Route (P&R) tools, which were bought by

Cadence Design Systems Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (stylized as cādence)Investor's Business DailCEO Lip-Bu Tan Molds Troubled Cadence Into Long-Term LeaderRetrieved November 12, 2020 is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology and computational ...

.Smith, Michael J. S., Application-Specific Integrated Circuits, Addison-Wesley, 1997, page 897.

References

{{Reflist EDA file formats