A guide for placing cells and drawing metal wires and vias in GDS chip-layout files using KLayout tools. It includes obstacle-aware routing and repeated design-rule checks.

Use it to arrange standard cells, create power rails, connect nets across metal layers, avoid obstacles, and check the layout against design rules.

It helps plan and revise chip layouts while catching spacing and other manufacturing-rule errors during routing.

klayout-pnr — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by geniuskey

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent

npx skills add geniuskey/klayout-draw-mcp --skill klayout-pnr

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/geniuskey/klayout-draw-mcp

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

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Your own site

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Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/geniuskey/klayout-draw-mcp/klayout-pnr"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/geniuskey/klayout-draw-mcp/klayout-pnr.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 59 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 2,155 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00059	$0.02155
Opus 5.5	$0.00024	$0.00862
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00012	$0.00431
Haiku 4.5	$0.00006	$0.00215

Measured 2mo ago against content hash d2b5cdf23f09, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

klayout-pnr scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2mo ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 4 executable files (scripts/demo_pnr.py, scripts/maze_router.py, scripts/placer.py, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/klayout-pnr/SKILL.md · 175 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 175 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

KLayout Place & Route

This is not a P&R engine. It is a set of techniques for driving the klayout-draw-mcp tools to do placement and routing well. The division of labour: you (the agent) plan the floorplan, net list and routing order; the server realises geometry and checks DRC. Iterate: route → drc_check → fix → repeat.

When to use

Placing cells (standard-cell rows, arrays, abutment)
Metal routing: multi-layer wires + vias, power rails
Automatic routing: connecting a net list while avoiding obstacles

Workflow

Start: new_layout(top_cell, dbu=0.001) or load_gds(path) to edit existing.
Define library cells: create_cell("NAND2") → add_box/add_polygon/add_via build it → use_cell(top) to return. (Or load_gds a cell library.)
Place: place_cell(cell, x, y, orient, nx, ny, dx, dy). For rows, compute positions with the place_rows recipe, then one place_cell per placement.
Route: add_wire(layer, points, width) for known paths (auto-inserts Manhattan corners) and add_via(...) at layer changes. For many nets / obstacle avoidance, use the maze router below inside run_script.
Check: drc_check([...]) — read the violation locations, adjust, re-run.
Save: save_gds(path, open_after=True).

Tools vs. run_script

Few shapes / known geometry → call the MCP tools directly (place_cell, add_wire, add_via). Coordinates are micrometers; keep them on your routing grid.
Automatic placement/routing over many nets → use run_script: build the layout programmatically with klayout.db and the recipes here, then save_gds.

Layer & grid conventions

Name	layer/dt	Use
OD `3/0`, POLY `6/0`		device layers
M1 `9/0`, VIA1 `11/0`, M2 `12/0`		routing stack
PWR `90/0`		power rails
BLOCK `200/0`		routing blockage / debug marker

Pick one routing pitch (e.g. 0.2 µm) and keep pins and wires on multiples of it. Convention: route M1 horizontal, M2 vertical, switch layers with a via at the turn.

Read the full file on GitHub · 175 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

2mo ago First seen · 175 lines · 59 tokens per session scan A d2b5cdf23f09

Subscribe to this mod's changes

klayout-pnr is a skill published in the GitHub repository geniuskey/klayout-draw-mcp (4 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 59 tokens to every session and 2,155 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

Hardware and IoT drawing klayout mcp

klayout-pnr next to 6 skills from other repositories
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