Hello there, Since F7 development cycle I've been introducing new opensource tools for electronic engineering. However I did not have time to make it a feature for Moonshine at that time. A few months later, I've been focusing primarily on the VLSI field and tried to ensure that one _can_ complete a design flow. If we don't have a complete design flow, there's no use for a user to use bits of it as it will cost him/her time and money. VLSI stands for : Very Large Scale Integration, about 10⁶ to 10⁷ transistors per chip So as you might have guess, these simulators should be mature and they are. Magic and alliance are around for more than 10 years. Now with Alliance VLSI cad, ngspice, magic and irsim, one can create and simulates his/her own chip on Fedora and asks a particular foundry to create it in real life. Those tools are used worldwide by more than 250 universities. Surely these VLSI tools are not for my mother, nor my neighbour but targeted for VLSI/ASIC students and hobbyists for educational purposes. Like I said in my blog http://clunixchit.blogspot.com/2007/08/eda-physical-layout-is-done-so-whats.html , real VLSI professional would use commercial tools that are far more expensive (more than 10 times of Vista, just to give you a number) and far more precise than Alliance, magic and friends. But at least they are opensource and will help students designing their own layouts or schematics. Those major commercial tools are built on RHEL and shipped the binaries on the cd (you can see glibc compiled under RHELx in those cds). So whatever educational institutions are using those commercial tools are either using RHEL or its clone. (I've never seen vendors shipping binaries built under a debian based distro). Take for example, at my university those nodes are under scientific linux because of that. The current situation is that students can't afford to have commercial tools at home and they are mostly windows users. Now that fedora is shipping those VLSI CADs it's an open door for these people to try linux and use opensource. Eventually, perhaps helping in the development of those VLSI cads. Also, one can easily deploy a VLSI simulation kit of fedora at home (thanks to yum). Enough blabla on my part, but it is important to get the picture. So here is the Feature Proposal of http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/FedoraElectronicLab For now, I'm calling it Fedora Electronic Lab. I was also thinking about Fedora Simulation Kit. However since for now what I explained, it is only about : # Analog/Digital Simulation # Spice Simulation # Hardware Development (VHDL,Verilog) # VLSI (layout, synthesis, Finite State Machines...) there are other tools that fedora provides to create a non-VLSI platform, but still in the Electronic field. Example: PIC Programming, Fedora ships ktechlab, piklab, sdcc those could be under "PIC Programming" secton. There are more examples like this. Hence by giving it a generic name, I'm hoping that other fedora maintainers packaging electronic simulators could join in. I understand that the use of "Fedora" in the "Fedora Electronic Lab" might be questioned. We will see to that if one objects. I hope to complete the wiki page by this Thursday so that FESCo could review it. This email is to familarise everyone about this little but important feature for education, so that they can comment and suggest ideas on how to proceed. Most of the work done was to ensure Interoperability between opensource simulators. Example: >From a hardware description of a Mealy/Moore machine, one can now create its layout: Hardware description -> checking vhdl syntax -> optimising -> schematic -> layout -> adding technology (e.g 0.25µm) -> Real layout -> chip fabrication. More information and screenshots can be found on my blog: http://clunixchit.blogspot.com/2007/07/from-vhdl-description-to-layout.html http://clunixchit.blogspot.com/2007/08/eda-addon-gds2pov-being-shipped-by.html http://clunixchit.blogspot.com/2007/08/eda-physical-layout-is-done-so-whats.html http://clunixchit.blogspot.com/2007/08/eda-physical-layout-is-done-so-whats_09.html Also, one opensource tools that I really miss is "netgen" for LVS checks (Layout Versus Schematic". There is segmentation fault on runtime. So if you are C guru, please do help to figure out why it crashes: http://clunixchit.blogspot.com/2007/08/loss-there-is-no-opensource-lvs-netlist.html regards, Chitlesh -- http://clunixchit.blogspot.com -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
