Once a chip design is complete, it is taped out for manufacturing. Tapeout gets its name
from the old practice of writing a specification of masks to magnetic tape; today, the mask
descriptions are usually sent to the manufacturer electronically. Two common formats for
mask descriptions are the Caltech Interchange Format (CIF) [Mead80] (mainly used in
academia) and the Calma GDS II Stream Format (GDS) [Calma84] (used in industry).
--P54 CMOS VLSI Design A Circuits and Systems Perspective
Fourth Edition
Neil H. E. Weste
Macquarie University and
The University of Adelaide
David Money Harris
Harvey Mudd College