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Boolean subtration issues
User
LayoutEditorFull
Tuesday 7th October 2025 Hi, I have an array of 1.2 million circles in a rectangular grid. And I wanted to invert by drawing a big box around the array and subtracting the array from the big box. This was not working so I used Flat on the array and made them individual elements and then tried doing the subtraction but the layout editor is crashing due to processing. Is there any tips on how to solve this issue? Thank you!
LayoutEditorFull
Tuesday 7th October 2025 Hi, I have an array of 1.2 million circles in a rectangular grid. And I wanted to invert by drawing a big box around the array and subtracting the array from the big box. This was not working so I used Flat on the array and made them individual elements and then tried doing the subtraction but the layout editor is crashing due to processing. Is there any tips on how to solve this issue? Thank you!
Jürgen
LayoutEditorFull
Tuesday 7th October 2025
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You need to invert the base cell of the array. Any circle array of this size will be far to big to handle its inversion. You would get a single polygon with 1.2 million holes. But GDS for example is limited to polygon with about 8000 vertexes. So the only solution is to use a inverted circle as the base element of an cell array. The parametric shape library contains an example macro to create such an array. 
LayoutEditorFull
Tuesday 7th October 2025
Attachments:
(only for registered users)
Eingefügtes Bild (3).png
You need to invert the base cell of the array. Any circle array of this size will be far to big to handle its inversion. You would get a single polygon with 1.2 million holes. But GDS for example is limited to polygon with about 8000 vertexes. So the only solution is to use a inverted circle as the base element of an cell array. The parametric shape library contains an example macro to create such an array. 