Basic Tools for Electronics in Fedora OS

In this article you are going to get introduced to the basic tools for electronics available in Fedora Electronic Lab.

There are numerous tools which suits your every need like

• Circuit simulation
• PCB designing
• VLSI designing
• Embedded Design
• Microcontroller Programmer 

Even you have a tool for calculating resistance using colour Code…getting curious

Screenshot of basic tools available in fedora

Since there are many tools avavilable I will be writing about these tools in more than two or three posts.

Below I listed basic tools under Anologe/Mixed signal Design

The Electric VLSI Design System

The Electric VLSI Design System is an open-source Electronic Design Automation (EDA) system that can handle many forms of circuit design, including:

• Custom IC layout
• Schematic Capture (digital and analog)
• Textual Languages (such as VHDL and Verilog)
• …and much more.

The Electric VLSI Design System is a highly flexible and powerful system that can handle many different types of circuit design (MOS, Bipolar, schematics, printed circuitry, hardware description languages, etc.) It handles geometry at any angle (not just Manhattan) and can even handle curves.

LVS Netlist Comparator

It is a tool for comparing netlists, a process known as LVS, which stands for “Layout vs. Schematic“. This is an important step in the integrated circuit design flow, ensuring that the geometry that has been laid out matches the expected circuit. Very small circuits can bypass this step by confirming circuit operation through extraction and simulation. Very large digital circuits are usually generated by tools from high-level descriptions, using compilers that ensure the correct layout geometry. The greatest need for LVS is in large analog or mixed-signal circuits that cannot be simulated in reasonable time. Even for small circuits, LVS can be done much faster than simulation, and provides feedback that makes it easier to find an error than does a simulation.

Magic VLSI Layout

Magic is an interactive system for creating and modifying VLSI circuit layouts. With Magic, you use a color graphics display and a mouse to design basic cells and to combine them hierarchically into larger structures. Magic has built-in knowledge of layout rules – as you are editing, it continuously checks for rule violations. It has a built-in circuit extractor: from the layout, the extractor creates an output file suitable for use with circuit simulation tools such as Spice (for detailed, mixed-signal simulation) or IRSIM (for digital simulation).

Toped

Toped is a cross-platform IC layout editor supporting GDS, OASIS and CIF formats. It is an open source project licensed under the GNU General Public License. The project is under active development.

Toped is driven by a build-in script interpreter. The script is designed to code and facilitate the layout generation and is used also for configuration. Automatic session recovery, undo with unlimited depth and customizable GUI are among the product features.

Toped focuses on rendering speed and quality of the screen output. The project uses the full power of OpenGL in terms of speed as well as unrestricted number of colors and fill patterns.XCircuit XCircuit is a Unix/X11 (and Windows, too, with an X-Server running) program for drawing publishable-quality electrical circuit schematic diagrams and related figures, and produce circuit netlists through schematic capture. XCircuit regards circuits as inherently hierarchical, and writes both hierarchical PostScript output and hierarchical SPICE netlists. Circuit components are saved in and retrieved from libraries which are fully editable. XCircuit does not separate artistic expression from circuit drawing; it maintains flexibility in style without compromising the power of schematic capture.

 

 

Other tools will be discussed in future posts