[Fedora-electronic-lab-list] RE: comments: EDA Rescue Plan

Wed Dec 10 23:50:10 UTC 2008

Hi Chitlesh, Hi Max --

Pardon me for butting in here.  Maybe I can help clarify things.

The Fedora Electronics Lab is a particular Linux distro released by
the Fedora team which is specialized towards electronics designers.
That is, besides the usual set of applications you get from stock
Fedora Core, FEL also bundles a bunch of open-source applications used
for electronics design.  This includes lots of things:

*  Chip design
    -- Magic (Chip layout editor.  Very old but completely functional
       and kept up to date by a team of folks at various universities.)
    -- Alliance (Chip design suite from French university.  Includes
       layout tools, VHDL compiler & synthesis, and other tools)
    -- Toped (Chip layout editor)
*  Simulation (Chip and board level)
    -- Icarus Verilog (Verilog compiler and simulation engine)
    -- GHDL (VHDL compiler providing ability to simulate)
    -- Alliance (VHDL simulation engine)
    -- GTKWave (Waveform viewer used with simulation tools)
    -- ngSPICE (Berkeley SPICE ported to Linux)
    -- GnuCap (Next-gen analog simulator)
    -- QUCS (Analog/digital/microwave simulation package from German
       university) 
*  PCB design
    -- gEDA/gaf (schematic entry, attribute management, netlisting to
       20 different netlist formats)
    -- gEDA/PCB (PCB layout editor)
    -- Kicad (schematic through layout PCB design suite)
    -- gerbv (Gerber viewer)
*  Embedded system tools

I have certainly missed a few tools included in FEL.

In any event, FEL is big news for electronics designers.  There is
lots of activity at the grassroots level as EEs discover the tools and
try them out.  Here's a recent presentation from an engineer at Agilent:

http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/detail/2777

There's plenty of material in FEL for more than a blog posting and an
article.

Hope this helps,

Stuart Brorson
gEDA Project

On Wed, 10 Dec 2008, Max Maxfield wrote:

> Hi there Chitlesh -- thanks for your email -- this is very interesting.
>
> Now, is your EDA software predominantly targeted at ASIC designs, or does it also cover Structured ASICs and FPGAs?
>
> If ASIC only, then I could do a "Chips and Dips" piece for use on the iDESIGN section of the www.ChipDesignMag.com website (just scroll down until you see the iDESIGN section).
>
> Alternatively, if it's also of interest for Structured ASIC and/or FPGA designs, then I can do a blog on www.pldesignline.com
>
> Regards -- Max
>
> ==========================
> Max The Magnificent
> TechBites Interactive
> 495 Production Ave
> Madison, AL 35758, USA
> Tel: 256-319-0257 (or 0255 or 0258)
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: chitlesh at gmail.com [mailto:chitlesh at gmail.com] On Behalf Of Chitlesh GOORAH
> Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2008 3:05 PM
> To: max at techbites.com
> Cc: fedora-electronic-lab-list
> Subject: comments: EDA Rescue Plan
>
> Hello Clive Maxfield,
>
> I have just read your post [1] "EDA Rescue Plan", which got my
> attention. However, like you I was more interested on what are the EDA
> tools Blue Pearl are proposing.
>
> Since you mentioned that you are constantly being surprised to
> discover established EDA vendors, let me introduce you to "Fedora
> Electronic Lab". [2]
>
> Fedora Electronic Lab (FEL), being a subset of the Fedora Project,
> strives to give users the best experience with opensource EDA tools.
> Each 6 months, the Fedora Project releases a new version of our Linux
> distribution "Fedora", together with a special LiveDVD dedicated for
> electronics. This LiveDVD  available for free is intended to serve as
> an electronic simulation platform, on which users can work on their
> ASIC design, embedded design,.. . While Fedora is engineered by Red
> Hat Inc. (the leader in Entreprise Linux) together with the community,
> our users benefit freely the cutting-edge technologies Red Hat is
> working on their RHEL 6. Our latest statistics proved that Fedora has
> more than 9.5 million users around the world and FEL has at least 1%
> of the user share.
>
> We (as non-profit community members) packaged opensource tools and
> work with their developers to ensure interoperability between our
> tools and that our users can deploy quickly and efficiently with our
> mature RPM/YUM deployment mechanism. In a matter of fact, we also
> provide marketing facilities as much as I can for those developers.
> (This email is an example). The developers of FEL's tools are working
> hard to keep their applications up-to-date with such a technological
> race in the EDA world. We don't claim to be in competition with
> Synopsys or Cadence, however we follow them closely and see how we can
> satisfy the needs of our users (end-users, students, lecturers, ..)
>
> Not only we provide EDA tools for free, but also a Linux Operating
> system which is the upstream of Red Hat Entreprise Linux. While mostly
> all ASIC design centers run RHEL for their Cadence and Synopsys tools,
> we believe our users will enjoy the same professional experience while
> designing their chips or embedded code on Fedora Electronic Lab.
>
> I would appreciate if you could spare some time writing a post about
> Fedora Electronic Lab. Since we are a non-profit organization, your
> readers would be interested in our EDA solutions whether the latter
> suits their personal use or deployment in an academic institutions.
>
> I welcome you to visit FEL's website at [2] and if there are any way
> we can assist you please let me know.
>
> [1]: http://www.pldesignline.com/212300434
> [2]: http://chitlesh.fedoraproject.org/FEL
> [3]: http://fedoraproject.org
>
>
> Kind Regards,
> Chitlesh GOORAH
>
>
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