what's the difference between magic.gds and regular gds?

@Anderson Hsieh the simple explanation is that magic gds is gds created from

mag

file data. There is not a direct correspondence between the

mag

layout data and the gds data - some of the gds layers are created through various operations on

mag

layers. “regular” gds as is output from klayout is a direct conversion where each shape in klayout has a corresponding gds element.

i do see that gds streamout can be done with both magic and klayout, is one of them more preferred than the other?

I believe there is actually a check in openlane to verify that the klayout and magic gds outputs are the same. There may have been some issues early on where there were discrepancies, but I can’t remember hearing of any differences recently.

I see, thank you