Re: Exportability of EDA industry from North America?

From: Chuck Harris (cf-NO-SPAM-harris_at_erols.com)
Date: 01/13/05 

Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 08:54:47 -0500

Stuart Brorson wrote:

> ngspice:
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/ngspice
>
> tclspice:
> http://tclspice.sourceforge.net/
>
> GnuCap
> http://www.geda.seul.org/tools/gnucap/index.html
>
>
> : digital->?
> Icarus Verilog:
> http://www.icarus.com/eda/verilog/
>
> Alliance:
> http://www-asim.lip6.fr/recherche/alliance/
>
> Confluence:
> http://www.launchbird.com/products.html
>
>
> : mixed->?
> Not there yet. :-( However, SystemC can be used for this kind of
> work. Is it synthesizable yet? Are the synthesis implementations
> open-source? (I don't watch this area that much.)
>
>
> : 2. Schematic capture
>
> gEDA (has schematic caputre, attribute management, netlisting,
> archiving, and other utilties useful for design):
> http://www.geda.seul.org/

The gEDA system is a very nice idea... It is truly a shame that it
is packaged with insufficient thought to portability. It wants the
system libraries it uses to be stuffed in non standard places inorder for
it to find them. It doesn't recognize that Redhat, and some of the
other distributions use differing names for some of the normal system
libraries. (GTK+ 2 comes to mind)

If you want to install the gEDA system so it is available to all users on
a multiuser system, you have to give all of those users root privileges on
certain system directories...There is no excuse for that!

All of the example designs are broken in such a way that they cannot find
the active components to put on the schematic.

There are no examples or documents describing how the project manager is
supposed to work. Saying it is obvious isn't much help.

The CDROM that was issued the other day is even worse than useless. It
chugs and churns, but it doesn't notice that it cannot find certain libraries,
and it just goes on like everything is ok. It also rebuilds and installs
the symbol libraries so many times I thought it was stuck in a loop.

Close, but not quite ready for prime time.

-Chuck Harris