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gEDA (GPL'ed Electronic Design) In EE Times
Stuart Brorson writes "At long last, today's EE Times published an article about the gEDA project.
The gEDA project has developed a mature, GPL'd, Linux-based suite of tools useful for electronic design. Using the gEDA tools, you can take a circuit design from schematic capture, through simulation, to PC board layout and fab. Some example PCBs done using gEDA include the Darrell Harmon's single board computer, and the 'free hardware' Ronja Project. Happily, the advantages of open-source for electronics design were well presented in the article. It's good to see that gEDA is getting some well-deserved press for the excellent work which has been going on from over six years now!"
http://www.dlharmon.com.nyud.net:8090/sbc.html http://ronja.twibright.com.nyud.net:8090/
gEDA has a mixed mode simulator program called Gnucap. I haven't tried it, but seems to be quite powerful, even while it's still work in progress.
Last time I looked, gEDA had no support for VHDL. There is a GHDL project that is sort of useful, for simulation only. For FPGA synthesis, you're pretty much stuck with the Xilinx (or other commercial) tools. Xilinx webpack is available for free (though it's limited), and I've heard that the command line utilities can be made to run under wine. There are also linux versions of the tools, but I don't know if they have the same availability as Webpack.
B4. What tools are frequently requested but are not going to be developed?
These tools are frequently requested, but will not be developed unless somebody steps up for the challenge.
o IC/ASIC designer.
o A VHDL/Verilog simulator.
The FreeHDL project will create a free VHDL simulator which gEDA will use.
Just some info about Ronja - it has inspired a lot of similar projects in Prague (it's all developed by quite small group of ppl in Czech Free Net - www.czfree.net) and there are already running some prototypes of Ronja or derived (non-GPL) projects on 100 Mbit optical data link!
Unfortunately, main Ronja HW developer - Karel Clock Kulhavy - is very "hard to communicate" man...
Don't forget Electric, an open source VLSI tool written in java. Sun recently interviewed the author about the challenge of rewriting it in java. Here's the article (with download).
The bar has been set pretty low, especially for basic usage. I use OrCad Capture and Layout at work for fairly simple circuits (Generally small circuits for test fixtures and one-off projects). Way too often, I find myself wondering how Cadence manages to get close to $10,000 for two programs with as many bugs and quirks. For example, there is only rudimentary copy-and-paste functionality in Layout, and Layout doesn't always recognize a disconnected pin as a design-rule error. Capture insists on writing to the installation directory when options are changed, rather than a per-user configuration file.
To be fair, you get some good features for that price, except that the casual user probably doesn't make extensive use of high-end features like autorouting or the ability to route on an extreme number of layers.
Come test your mettle in the world of Alter Aeon!
As one of the few people actively working on PCB, I can only say this: If you don't tell us what you don't like, we can't make it better. As with all open software, YOU the user are an important part of the development process, even if all you do is [constructively] complain.
Recently, I added user-customizable menus. Have you tried changing the UI to do what YOU want? That's why I added it.
Ngspice is a vast improvement its predecessor in at least one important area: Ngspice is eminently hackable and fixable because it uses normal makefiles and GNU configure. (Try fixing Berkeley Spice for a real pain in the ass. It has the most asshole make system you have ever seen).