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gEDA (GPL'ed Electronic Design) In EE Times

Posted by timothy on from the beyond-world-domination dept.

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!"

1 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. Open Source in EDA by wannasleep · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Just few comments to clarify what we are talking about here

    First of all, EDA (Electronic Design Automation) is a 30+ years old industry (maybe even 40+, but I wasn't born then). It spans tools whose cost goes from hundreds dollars to few hundred thousands dollars per license. It also spans several fields, from computer science, to systems theory, to physics, to micro-electronics, to chemistry, etc. etc.

    The typical flows for a successfull tools are:
    • a PhD student or his advisor has an idea, writes papers about it and maybe even implements it. Then he starts a company and they make milions with it. Synopsys and Cadence (the two biggest players of the market) were started like that.
    • The same people have an idea and actually have a full implementation and they sustain the basic research. The tool is put in open source fashion (rarely is GPL'd) and every company can modify it. The shiniest example is SPICE . The first version was written more than 30 years ago. Berkeley still owns it and everybody implements variants that are more or less compatible. Either Commercial eda tools (HSPICE, spectre, eldo, adssim) or proprietary implementations that are used within a company (TI spice, ST spice, motorola own spice, etc.). Analog design wouldn't exist without spice.
    • Companies try to dominate the market. They figure out that they need to develop and control a platform. They make it open source (of course all its products work on it, more or less). An example is Cadence with open access. The idea of course is opposed by competitors who try to pass their own platform. Eventually they will reach an agreement

    Of course, there are plenty of others, like magma's case and also plenty of unsuccessfull ventures, but in general EDA has benefitted a lot from open source, and some of the biggest names in the university are still open source fans.