On 1/20/19 9:16 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote:
Has the Electric integrated circuit CAD software been considered and rejected for some reason?
Yes. We evaluate a lot of tools during our 1st Hackathon in May last year. Unfortunately no tool matches our need.
In my humble opinion it was a bad move from Electric to switch to Java. Java catches more programmer on the good side but also has do deal with a huge memory footprint. I guess, that our clients playing with smaller laptops than with big iron. So memory is an issue as long as dealing with VLSI (routing, placement, and all the other stuff) needs a lot of them. Both, Java and the design which needs memory also probably does not fit into laptops.
While I am a big fan of KiCAD, it seems to me that starting out with something originally created for integrated circuits would be a better choice. In fact, Electric also has resources allowing it to be used for PCBs but it would be awkward for that compared to KiCAD. I can see that using a single tool for everything would be attractive, however. I am just not sure it is practical.
We would get more VLSI designer, if we are using a familiar GUI for most of them. Something like KiCad which has a great momentum, or Lepton EDA (a active gEDA fork) could be help. Our first attempt was to clone QFlow (http://opencircuitdesign.com/qflow) - which also needs a lot of work. The effort to doing all the stuff alone is to big for us - our small team is already occupied.