Electric

Electric is a sophisticated electrical CAD system for the design of integrated circuits. It can handle many forms of design, including:

• Custom Integrated-Circuit layout
• Schematics
• Hardware description languages

Electric has these CAD facilities:

• Design rule checking
• Electrical rule checking
• Simulation (built-in and external, with waveform display)
• Generation (ROMs, PLAs, Pad Frames, Fill, Implant coverage, etc.)
• Placement
• Routing
• Silicon compilation
• Network consistency checking (LVS)
• Logical Effort analysis
• Compaction

Electric can design these types of integrated-circuits:

• CMOS (many variations)
• Newer layout technologies (thin film, carbon nanotube, photonics, etc.)
• Older layout technologies (nMOS, Bipolar, BiCMOS, etc.)
• Abstract (digital filters, temporal logic, etc.)

Electric handles these file formats:

• CIF I/O
• GDS I/O
• EDIF I/O
• LEF and DEF I/O
• DXF I/O
• SUE Input
• Gerber Input
• Bookshelf Input
• VHDL I/O
• Verilog Output
• EAGLE, PADS, and ECAD Output
• PostScript, SVG, HPGL, and PNG Output

Electric is written in Java, so it runs on all operating systems.

Read more about CAD facilities, IC design types, and file formats.

Read about the history of Electric.

Read the online user's manual.

Read Steven Rubin's textbook on CAD tools, specifically the chapter on Electric.

Visit Electric's external website.

Peruse Electric's discussion groups: Google, GNU.

Download the latest version of Electric from ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/electric/ or any of the many mirrors.

Return to GNU's home page.

Please send FSF & GNU inquiries & questions to gnu@gnu.org. There are also other ways to contact the FSF.

Please send comments on these web pages to webmasters@www.gnu.org, send other questions to gnu@gnu.org.

Copyright (C) 1998 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.

Updated: 26 Sep 2017 smr