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How/where are people getting their PCBs manufactured and assembled? Are cheap chinese services reliable? How do you protect your IP when using manufacturing services?
It's all about trust.
Kicad is an amazing tool. Not easy to get into, kind of like vim in that regard, but when mastered, it's really powerful. With that in place, I wish it had: . Something to import LTSpice files directly into its schematics tool (or even better, go back and forth) . A rough but well integrated auto-router . A better parts library management system (the current one is really bad). But even without those, designing elect…
KiCad already has an auto-router?
But yeah, parts management is a mess...
Hopefully, EDA tools for chip-design will get similar attention too, as well as a "normal" CADs. Software like LibreCAD[1] and FreeCAD[2], Qucs[3], gEDA[4], Yosys[5] and Symbiflow[6], Chisel/FIRRTL[7], OpenROAD initiative[8], Degate[9], and many others. [1] https://librecad.org/ [2] https://www.freecadweb.org/ [3] https://github.com/Qucs [4] http://www.geda-project.org/ [5] http://www.clifford.at/yosys/ [6] https://s…
Is there a high level overview, for programmers, of how chip design software works? Something I eventually want to investigate is building some of those pieces of software but I have no idea where to get started learning about that ecosystem. From a software perspective I have a good understanding of how source gets turned into machine code, which gets packaged into shared object code, which then gets linked into a b…
https://github.com/verilog-to-routing/vtr-verilog-to-routing
Kicad is an amazing tool. Not easy to get into, kind of like vim in that regard, but when mastered, it's really powerful. With that in place, I wish it had: . Something to import LTSpice files directly into its schematics tool (or even better, go back and forth) . A rough but well integrated auto-router . A better parts library management system (the current one is really bad). But even without those, designing elect…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
EDA tools are a different beast... There is a reason why the field is completely monopolized by the big three - Cadence, Synopsys, and Mentor Graphics. And a lot of the tools you mentioned are targeted towards FPGA design rather than full or semi-custom ASIC design. The big three have tools that can handle both.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Relative to something like Microsoft Office they’re tiny and we have open competitive solutions there (a product notorious for a billion corner cases). And let’s not forget “EDA software” was single handedly pioneered by one woman and some lisp. Before then, it was hundreds of men taping out circuits on 4x8’ ply with...physical tape who all complained the labor and complexity costs w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a high level overview, for programmers, of how chip design software works? Something I eventually want to investigate is building some of those pieces of software but I have no idea where to get started learning about that ecosystem. From a software perspective I have a good understanding of how source gets turned into machine code, which gets packaged into shared object code, which then gets linked into a b…
Take a look at Verilog-to-Routing - an educational/research tool that is open-source. https://github.com/verilog-to-routing/vtr-verilog-to-routing
How/where are people getting their PCBs manufactured and assembled? Are cheap chinese services reliable? How do you protect your IP when using manufacturing services?
If you open-source your "IP" (I'm quoting it, because the very name offends me), the problem magically goes away. But then, that's something culturally almost impossible to even imagine from people who hark from the HW design world.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Start with an electrical and computer engineering course. Some eda tools are literally fancy vector graphics engines. Some are em simulators wrapped up. Others are circuit modeing tools. It's not really like programming. The tools are deeply integrated into the physics of the system.
> It's not really like programming. The tools are deeply integrated into the physics of the system. What specifically makes electronics different from modeling other systems with software? DSP immediately comes to mind as something that is explicitly tied to Maxwell but there is really good software out there for describing, modeling, and creating signal processing components similar to how you'd write software. An e…
As for the DSLs/workflow/etc there are companies in this space.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you open-source your "IP" (I'm quoting it, because the very name offends me), the problem magically goes away. But then, that's something culturally almost impossible to even imagine from people who hark from the HW design world.
When you open source your hardware IP, you can buy it from Aliexpress few weeks later. That’s why I’ll never put final design on public github repository. For first prototype it’s ok. Final design brings in a cost of few thousand euros for electromagnetic compatibility measurement and I’ll definitely not give away this one.
Sounds like an easy way to get others to do your work for you for free. Win win. Why go through the hassle of establishing a supply chain. So what's the catch? Why are we still labouring instead of waiting for our products to magically ship themselves through Aliexpress?
How/where are people getting their PCBs manufactured and assembled? Are cheap chinese services reliable? How do you protect your IP when using manufacturing services?