PCB CAD

[Don Prescott]

OK.... after all that wuffle about the distinction twix open source
and shareware, give me one well known organisation using "open source"
PCB layout tools on mission critical projects...?

I'm waiting.............!

Prescott

 

[Stuart Brorson]

Don Prescott <DMBPrescott@aol.com> wrote:
: OK.... after all that wuffle about the distinction twix open source
: and shareware, give me one well known organisation using "open source"
: PCB layout tools on mission critical projects...?

: I'm waiting.............!


I apologize for not responding sooner; I have been traveling, and away
from the net for a while.

Asking about EDA for "mission-critical" applications make you sound
like a marketing flack for one of the various EDA companies. Are you
trying to spread a little FUD by implying that free/open-source tools
aren't up to the hypothetically exacting demands of a Fortune-500
company working on massive projects, and that you can therefore
dismiss them out of hand?

*chuckle*

Let's be clear: What is the current market segment served by gEDA,
PCB, Icarus, and other F/OSS EDA projects? These tools are written
*for*, and used *by* folks at the low and middle segments of the CAD
marketplace. They are ideal for students, hobbiests, educators, and
small-time consultants -- a market segment which has been badly served
by the EDA vendors (who offer bad service, ridiculously high prices,
and buggy products). Right now, F/OSS tools are workable replacements
for things like Circuit Maker and Electronics Workbench. Indeed, if
you want to do a multi-page design with little or no hierarchy, and
lay it out as a 4 or 6 layer board, you might have previously used one
of these apps, or even Orcad or Protel. Now, for this kind of job
you can use gEDA instead.

As for "mission critical" designs: Do Fortune 500 companies use
Circuit Maker or EWB for "mission critical" designs? No way. Is
Protel capable of "mission critical" projects? That's debatable at
best -- my experience with it was that it was buggy and flakey, but
with enough swearing & futzing around you could ultimately get the job
done anyway.

Therefore, your question of whether the F/OSS apps are ready for
"mission-critical" design is a red herring; none of the apps which
serve the low to middle market segment are really "mission critical".

Note that with the gEDA suite (which is generally less buggy than
Protel, by the way), you can not only get the job done, but the
program is free, offers ASCII file formats, legacy design protection,
and is unencumbered by licencing restrictions. *That's* the important
take-away point.

Now, are people using open-source EDA for low and mid-level projects?
Yes. Here are some public examples:

Ronja free space optical link:
http://ronja.twibright.com/

D. Harmon's Single Board Computer:
http://www.dlharmon.com/sbc.html

Mikey Sklar's electric clothing:
http://www.electric-clothing.com/tools.html

ESNUG -- DeepChip website:
http://www.deepchip.com/items/dvcon04-02.html
(about 1/2 way down there is a mention of Icarus Verilog used at
InformASIC.)

These are the publically announced projects which I am personally
aware of without doing a Google search. If you Google around, you
will find others. Also, I am aware of some people using gEDA & Icarus
in "stealth mode" inside larger corporations. However, it's not up to
me to give away their identity, so I am sorry that I cannot provide
any backing to this assertion. I realize this is unsatisfying.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

That's the present. What about the future? Consider again the
advantages offered by gEDA and other F/OSS apps:
* Open-source.
* Documented ASCII file formats.
* Legacy design protection.
* They don't tie you up in licencing knots.
* Download is free.
These advantages are important to practicing engineers, but are
antithetical to the interests of commercial EDA vendors, who need to
find ways to lock down their customers and then squeeze money from
them by every device available. Consequently, it is unlikely that the
commercial EDA vendors will be able to offer the same features.
Therefore, they can't compete against the F/OSS stuff in the long run,
at least on these parameters.

Meanwhile, as more and more people become aware of F/OSS EDA projects
like gEDA, the projects will acquire developers, who will fix more
bugs, introduce more features, create more apps, and so on. So, on
one hand, the commercial vendors have frozen development of their
low-end stuff (because low-end CAD is commoditized & doesn't make
money), and will not meaningfully implement any of the above features
which are important to engineers. On the other hand, the F/OSS stuff
will continue to grow. I think you can see where it will end up.

At the high end, however, it's another story. At the high end, the
EDA vendors & VCs interested in EDA have lots of money to
lavish on research & development of new tools and algorithms. The
F/OSS guys don't have the time, resources, or interest to compete at
this level. Therefore, I don't expect to see people using PCB instead
of Allegro or Mentor Expedition any time soon. However, for low and
mid-level size designs -- the bread and butter of students, hobbiests,
and small consultants -- I fully expect to see gEDA and other F/OSS
applications take over the market place over the next decade, simply
because the commercial EDA vendors won't & can't compete.

Stuart

 

You're twisting my words and adding your own .....yet again!! I
don't
use or like phrases that have a sexual connotations like "sucks", so
PLEASE don't attribute them,in any way, to me...

Cute. You're right, you never used sexual innuendo in your words here:

-"raw, unsupported, buggy, pieces of software "
-"Useless if you're trying to design a real product that's gotta go out
the door on time"

For the record, I intended no sexual connotation by the remark "sucks".
If you choose to view it that way, that is your right.

For the time being, I agree to disagree - I'm not even sure what you're
arguing about any more.

 

[David]

On Thu, 16 Dec 2004 22:33:29 +0000, Stuart Brorson wrote:

Don Prescott <DMBPrescott@aol.com> wrote:
: OK.... after all that wuffle about the distinction twix open source
: and shareware, give me one well known organisation using "open source"
: PCB layout tools on mission critical projects...?

: I'm waiting.............!


I apologize for not responding sooner; I have been traveling, and away
from the net for a while.

Asking about EDA for "mission-critical" applications make you sound
like a marketing flack for one of the various EDA companies. Are you
trying to spread a little FUD by implying that free/open-source tools
aren't up to the hypothetically exacting demands of a Fortune-500
company working on massive projects, and that you can therefore
dismiss them out of hand?

*chuckle*

Let's be clear: What is the current market segment served by gEDA,
PCB, Icarus, and other F/OSS EDA projects? These tools are written
*for*, and used *by* folks at the low and middle segments of the CAD
marketplace. They are ideal for students, hobbiests, educators, and
small-time consultants -- a market segment which has been badly served
by the EDA vendors (who offer bad service, ridiculously high prices,
and buggy products). Right now, F/OSS tools are workable replacements
for things like Circuit Maker and Electronics Workbench. Indeed, if
you want to do a multi-page design with little or no hierarchy, and
lay it out as a 4 or 6 layer board, you might have previously used one
of these apps, or even Orcad or Protel. Now, for this kind of job
you can use gEDA instead.

As for "mission critical" designs: Do Fortune 500 companies use
Circuit Maker or EWB for "mission critical" designs? No way. Is
Protel capable of "mission critical" projects? That's debatable at
best -- my experience with it was that it was buggy and flakey, but
with enough swearing & futzing around you could ultimately get the job
done anyway.

Therefore, your question of whether the F/OSS apps are ready for
"mission-critical" design is a red herring; none of the apps which
serve the low to middle market segment are really "mission critical".

Note that with the gEDA suite (which is generally less buggy than
Protel, by the way), you can not only get the job done, but the
program is free, offers ASCII file formats, legacy design protection,
and is unencumbered by licencing restrictions. *That's* the important
take-away point.

Now, are people using open-source EDA for low and mid-level projects?
Yes. Here are some public examples:

Ronja free space optical link:
http://ronja.twibright.com/

D. Harmon's Single Board Computer:
http://www.dlharmon.com/sbc.html

Mikey Sklar's electric clothing:
http://www.electric-clothing.com/tools.html

ESNUG -- DeepChip website:
http://www.deepchip.com/items/dvcon04-02.html
(about 1/2 way down there is a mention of Icarus Verilog used at
InformASIC.)

These are the publically announced projects which I am personally
aware of without doing a Google search. If you Google around, you
will find others. Also, I am aware of some people using gEDA & Icarus
in "stealth mode" inside larger corporations. However, it's not up to
me to give away their identity, so I am sorry that I cannot provide
any backing to this assertion. I realize this is unsatisfying.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

That's the present. What about the future? Consider again the
advantages offered by gEDA and other F/OSS apps:
* Open-source.
* Documented ASCII file formats.
* Legacy design protection.
* They don't tie you up in licencing knots.
* Download is free.
These advantages are important to practicing engineers, but are
antithetical to the interests of commercial EDA vendors, who need to
find ways to lock down their customers and then squeeze money from
them by every device available. Consequently, it is unlikely that the
commercial EDA vendors will be able to offer the same features.
Therefore, they can't compete against the F/OSS stuff in the long run,
at least on these parameters.

Meanwhile, as more and more people become aware of F/OSS EDA projects
like gEDA, the projects will acquire developers, who will fix more
bugs, introduce more features, create more apps, and so on. So, on
one hand, the commercial vendors have frozen development of their
low-end stuff (because low-end CAD is commoditized & doesn't make
money), and will not meaningfully implement any of the above features
which are important to engineers. On the other hand, the F/OSS stuff
will continue to grow. I think you can see where it will end up.

At the high end, however, it's another story. At the high end, the
EDA vendors & VCs interested in EDA have lots of money to
lavish on research & development of new tools and algorithms. The
F/OSS guys don't have the time, resources, or interest to compete at
this level. Therefore, I don't expect to see people using PCB instead
of Allegro or Mentor Expedition any time soon. However, for low and
mid-level size designs -- the bread and butter of students, hobbiests,
and small consultants -- I fully expect to see gEDA and other F/OSS
applications take over the market place over the next decade, simply
because the commercial EDA vendors won't & can't compete.

Stuart

It's interesting to compare the EDA market with the embedded software
development tools market, which is closely related. The difference is
that there is not so much in the way of seriously high-end, high-price
software development tools (you would be hard pushed to spend a budget of
$20,000 for one target - except perhaps for some emulator hardware), and
there are more users, especially at the low end. The market is also a bit
more mature in many ways (perhaps because of the larger number of users),
and I think might give an indication of the future in the EDA market.

In particular, there are high-end tools, with compilers from Green Hills,
Diab Data, Metrowerks and the like - these are the best
compilers/debuggers that money can buy, and clearly outclass the cheap and
free tools. These vendors have learned to live with open-source software,
and compete against it on quality, support and features, combined with
supporting it (such as supporting embedded linux targets). At the
mid-range, companies like IAR have a certain stable base (their key
selling point is a wide range of support for targets), but I don't think
their future is solid. A few years ago, microcontroller vendors would
work closely with IAR on new architectures, and support them as their
"official" compiler - the market is now rebelling against that, starting
from the low-end but working up. Companies like Atmel and Texas
Instruments listen when users say they would buy their chips if they had a
wider range of tools available, and you now see links to gcc ports on
vendors web sites. In addition to the growing inroads made by open source
software here, there is also a growth market in "cheap and cheerful"
tools. These vendors specialise in making software that is easy to use
and providing great support. Typically they are low on features, and
technically mediocore (in terms of optimisations, for example) - but that
doesn't matter much to their market. I can imagine this sort of market
growing significantly in the EDA world too.

There is another big advantage of open source tools - they are useful for
other vendors. As an example, look at Altera and their tools for FPGA
design and especially for their Nios II soft processor. Instead of
re-inventing the wheel, or buying in proprietry technology, they use tcl
and perl extensively for scripting. The do at least as good a job as any
proprietry scripting language, are well-known, and are free - important if
you want to be able to give away free, limited copies of your software.
When they made their Nios processor, instead of writing a compiler toolkit
from scratch, or working with a big commercial vendor, they ported gcc.
This gave them a solid basis to work with. When they wanted an IDE, the
started with eclipse and wrote some plug-ins. I can also imagine this
sort of thing becoming more common in the EDA world - if I wanted to sell
a new simulator program, I'd bundle it with gEDA to form a complete
package. Sure, I'd make sure it would work nicely with Protel and Mentor
and all the other major commercial packages - but it would give me a head
start for little effort.

 

[Tim]

Hello, Don,

I know of one aerospace company currently developing their next range of boards
using FreePCB. They key for them is that they can get the source, the fact that
it is also free is immaterial, though naturally they are delighted it's free, if
a little incredulous. Now that their eyes have been opened to open-source, a
snowball effect is in motion, they are very keen to get hold of open-source DSP
software.

I suspect that at the current moment in time there are very few companies using
open source PCB layout tools, though as in so many other areas of development,
there is an inexorable drift toward open-source software: it's the source that
counts.

Happy xmas, Tim.