Mentor Graphics plans to support the yet unnamed GDSII replacement format in its Calibre product family and the IC Station tool suite in commercial release as soon as Q1 2003. GDSII has been used for decades in the semiconductor industry to transfer physical design data to photomasks. The new, non-proprietary, interchange file format will be used first on leading-edge technology nodes - 130nm, 90nm and 65nm.

The EDA company took on editing responsibilities for the specification, the
initial specification itself (Version 3 SLF) and assigning employees to the
SEMI NSF WG (SEMI New Stream Format Working Group).
Mentor agreed to hand off all proprietary rights to Version 3 SLF and any
subsequent versions that include numerous contributions from Working Group
members from other EDA companies, semiconductor companies and the mask
industry. The company also contributed a GDSII-to-SLF translator to Working
Group members on four platforms and participated in both the Working Group
and SEMI Data Path Task Force.
The new encapsulated format specification offers substantial improvements in
data volume efficiency. To date, testing shows up to 10-50 times reductions
in hierarchical data volume from GDSII, and up to two or more times
reduction in flat data volume from the MEBES mode5 format.