GDS Viewer

Click any .gds file in VS Code and see the chip layout rendered in 3D — inspired by the Tiny Tapeout GDS viewer.

• Self-contained: parses GDSII and builds the 3D mesh in JavaScript. No Python, no internet.
• sky130 layer stack (real z-heights and colors) detected automatically; generic stacked view for other PDKs.
• Orbit / pan / zoom (mouse), R reset view, T top-down view.
• Layer visibility toggles, top-cell selector, Z-exaggeration slider.

Install

code --install-extension gds-viewer-0.1.0.vsix

Then click any .gds file. To open the raw bytes instead, right-click the file → Open With… → Text Editor / Hex Editor.

Notes

• Large flattened chips (tens of MB) take a few seconds to parse and mesh; a progress bar is shown.
• Hierarchy is rendered with GPU instancing: repeated standard cells are meshed once and placed many times, so memory stays reasonable even for full-chip layouts.
• PATH elements are rendered as per-segment rectangles; TEXT labels are not rendered.