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KiCad Joins Linux Foundation to Advance Electronic Design Automation

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Re: KiCad Joins Linux Foundation to Advance Electronic Design Automation

#31

Post by anonymousse1234 »

ur-whale wrote: post #4

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…

You can try gEDA topological autorouter Toporouter: https://youtu.be/NqT4ZYGB3VY

You can also use TopoR autorouter for free: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopoR

Topological routers make really interesting board designs looking like something retro or biological in its nature :)

Re: KiCad Joins Linux Foundation to Advance Electronic Design Automation

#32

Post by therealcamino »

paulgerhardt wrote: post #10
Cyph0n wrote: post #5

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…

To make things more concrete than "big" or "relatively...tiny", some quick googling puts Cadence's annual R&D spending at a little less than $1B and Synopsys's around $1.2B. Mentor Graphics is part of Siemens, so that'd be harder to figure out.

Re: KiCad Joins Linux Foundation to Advance Electronic Design Automation

#33

Post by baybal2 »

nrp wrote: post #14
ur-whale wrote: post #4

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…

Library management is a little messy, but on the other hand it’s great that the master version of it is just a GitHub repository. That makes it really easy to pull down the latest, add new parts as you work on a project, and submit pull requests to share them back.

I remember there was a company trying to make "EDA library" as a service with online API.

I wonder if they are still around and if one can use their API from KiCad

Re: KiCad Joins Linux Foundation to Advance Electronic Design Automation

#35

Post by Taniwha »

minxomat wrote: post #27
gravypod wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Do engineers at Intel, AMD, and Nvidia manually lay out each feature in their chip designs? If not, what workflow tools have they developed internally? Could those tools, or similar, be used for smaller scale circuit design? The answer is yes, but of course not exclusively. There was an English talk at ccc a while ago by an AMD engineer with lots of details on the whole process.

Not every feature, typically there will be a physical team that will lay out a gate library, data paths and srams for any particular process - but the bulk of the gates are laid out by CAD tools from high level languages using gates from the gate library

Re: KiCad Joins Linux Foundation to Advance Electronic Design Automation

#36

Post by blcArmadillo »

gravypod wrote: post #3
xvilka wrote: post #2

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…

I haven't personally taken these so can't comment on quality but there is:

1. https://www.coursera.org/learn/vlsi-cad-logic

2. https://www.coursera.org/learn/vlsi-cad-layout

Re: KiCad Joins Linux Foundation to Advance Electronic Design Automation

#37

Post by ur-whale »

mdszy wrote: post #26
ur-whale wrote: post #4

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…

> A rough but well integrated auto-router If you're depending on an auto-router, you're doing it wrong.

I'm not depending on an auto-router, which is why I went through the exertion of adding the word "rough" in my post. Auto-routers are a very nice time saver to get something going quickly.

Also, you have strictly no idea what kind of design I'm working on and therefore no idea what constraints - or lack thereof - I have to deal with when I design boards.

Finally, I've heard so many boomer EDA folks spew out this lame argument ... it's the same old tiresome song from folks who use to claim compilers could never beat hand-crafted assembly. They're very seldom heard from these days.

Re: KiCad Joins Linux Foundation to Advance Electronic Design Automation

#38

Post by ur-whale »

HarryBeadle wrote: post #12
ur-whale wrote: post #4

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…

You can simulate using SPICE in KiCad now (ngspice). KiCad already has an auto-router? But yeah, parts management is a mess...

>You can simulate using SPICE in KiCad now (ngspice).

Yes, but LTSPice is so much better than ngspice. I really wish the Linear would OpenSource it, it's a really cool piece of software.

KiCad does not really have a very well integrated auto-router. As someone pointed out, the only "integrated" one was deprecated, and all the others I've tried are very clunky (from the pov of being integrated).

Re: KiCad Joins Linux Foundation to Advance Electronic Design Automation

#39

Post by ur-whale »

anonymousse1234 wrote: post #31
ur-whale wrote: post #4

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…

You can try gEDA topological autorouter Toporouter: https://youtu.be/NqT4ZYGB3VY You can also use TopoR autorouter for free: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopoR Topological routers make really interesting board designs looking like something retro or biological in its nature :)

I did try TopoR back in the day, but the lack of integrations was IIRC a PITN.

I've not tried Toporouter and will go paly with it, thanks for the pointer.

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