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posted by janrinok on Thursday February 26 2015, @05:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the open-data dept.

The computer-aided design software packages (ECADs) available to electronics folks for creating schematics and printed circuit board layouts have long been an aggravation when trying to share data with someone who uses a package produced by a different vendor--due to proprietary file formats that are (apparently, purposely) incompatible.

Many years ago, Cadsoft's EAGLE was available as a demo that would do very limited PCB creation but which had unlimited ability to view/print already-created files. It was also cross-platform. For a short time, EAGLE-compatible files became a quasi-standard for amateurs and pros on a budget.

In 2006, however, Cadsoft got greedy and DRM'd their stuff so that it would lock you out of your work product under certain circumstances, as described by Markus Zingg on October 24. Cadsoft quickly lost what little luster it had in the community. CERN engineers are hoping to produce a package that will do the same job - but better.

More down the page...

Now, Cian O'Luanaigh at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, reports

[...]so far, the engineers who design [printed circuit] boards often have had no option but to use proprietary tools.[1] That's about to change: CERN experts are adapting the open-source software KiCad to make it an efficient tool for designing open-source hardware. This Free Software makes it easier for electronics engineers to share their designs.

KiCad development began in 1992. The software--which runs on the computer-operating systems GNU/Linux, Windows, and Apple OS X--creates schematics for printed circuit boards with up to 32 copper layers with additional technical layers. Since 2013, experts in the CERN Beams department have made important contributions to KiCad as part of the Open Hardware Initiative (OHI), which provides a framework to facilitate knowledge exchange across the electronic design community.

"Our vision is to allow the hardware developers to share as easily as their software colleagues," says Javier Serrano, head of the BE-CO-HT section and OHI initiator. "Software sources are easily shared online because they are text files and everyone has access to editors and compilers that turn the sources into a program. On the other hand, in the case of hardware design, most of the time this is done using proprietary tools. Therefore, in order for people to modify the sources, they need to use those proprietary tools."

When [development on] the KiCAD project started at CERN, many free tools were already available to hardware designers but none was easy enough to use when designing a complex circuit. Among them, KiCad showed the best potential.

"We started by cleaning the basic code and introducing a new graphical engine," says Tomasz Wlostowski, a member of the BE-CO-HT section who, among other things, is in charge of supervising the development of new features for KiCad. "With our contribution, we aim to develop KiCad up to a point where it becomes the de facto standard for sharing, and more and more users, including corporate ones, start working with it."

Next week, the team is going to release two new features that many in the free/Open Source EDA community have been asking for: differential pair routing and trace-length matching.

"Thanks to the new differential pair routing, you can more easily design PCBs that support fast signals over a long distance and with less noise. This is particularly important for devices that deal with great amounts of data," says Wlostowski.

"The second tool--length matching--automatically ensures that two signals take exactly the same time to cross the PCB. When the feature is selected, the tool automatically adds meanders to adjust the delay. This is very useful when timing and synchronisation become important parameters to take into account."

[...]Raspberry Pi and Arduino have already donated to the CERN KiCad initiative. You can join the effort to enhance KiCad and make it an efficient tool for PCB design by making a donation via the CERN and Society website.

[1] This guy has a list of what he perceives as the shortcomings of the current KiCad package.

 
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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by tftp on Thursday February 26 2015, @07:40PM

    by tftp (806) on Thursday February 26 2015, @07:40PM (#150060) Homepage

    Doesn't look very advanced, though. It's more like rewritten Eagle UI, with all its deficiencies. Potentially it could be a good software to have; but my concern is that it is so far behind the modern PCB CADs that it won't get much traction. At the same time incumbents like PADS also have their share of issues - the cost is just one of them.

    It's pretty difficult to design a good autorouter, though. The best ones out there exist for 20 years, being incrementally improved for all this time. You cannot route a modern board by hand - unless you have infinite time and infinite patience. Most traces do not require special attention. But other traces are length-controlled, and via-controlled, and layer-restricted, and have width on per-layer basis. Some footprints require this or that escape pattern and escape widths; some areas of the board may have different clearance rules. It's a lot of work, and most of it is complex math.

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  • (Score: 2) by iwoloschin on Thursday February 26 2015, @10:11PM

    by iwoloschin (3863) on Thursday February 26 2015, @10:11PM (#150146)

    Does it need to be advanced? I mean, maybe you're doing very cool things, but for my uses, KiCAD is great. Sure, it's not as polished, but the UI is pretty intuitive, and it's got a very active developer group who seem responsive to ideas, and to help!

    For all of my home projects KiCAD is plenty sufficient. Once differential pairs and trace length matching are working, I suspect it will be sufficient for most of my work projects as well. Though, to be fair, part of me just doesn't want to have to deal with a VM to run Windows to run OrCAD/PADS/etc.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by tftp on Thursday February 26 2015, @10:37PM

      by tftp (806) on Thursday February 26 2015, @10:37PM (#150171) Homepage

      It depends on what you are doing. If your signals are limited to 100 kHz (for example) then perhaps nothing else is needed. However in practice you need to align lengths of pin pairs, not just nets; and you need to specify routing topologies. That's typical for DDR routing. I sometimes need blind / buried vias, and via-in-pad is pretty common (with epoxy fill and plating over.) So it all depends; you can make a simple doorbell by writing Gerbers by hand. But if you have some complicated, fine pitch packages then you need reliable verification algorithms that make sure that all the design requirements (clearances, trace widths) are met. As a single, 10-layer PCB in small quantity may cost you $3K each, saving money on a $2K Altium does not look like a smart move. And, as I said, the autorouter is always a work of art. You can always route by hand, but that is extremely expensive. Absolute beginners may want to use entry-level, free, web-based products that some PCB houses offer.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 27 2015, @01:14AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 27 2015, @01:14AM (#150239)

      You missed the main point.

      What is needed is an equivalent of ODF (OpenDocument Format) for schematics and board layouts.
      Unless this package (and its native file formats) are sufficiently sophisticated to serve -ALL- users, it won't achieve the goal--which is interoperability between -ANY- 2 users.

      If the file format becomes wildly successful, ALL ECAD vendors will have to support it or be left out in the cold. Great punchline. [xkcd.com]

      KiCAD becoming wonderful while being gratis and libre is secondary to the actual goal--though it seems to be a necessary part of the process.

      N.B. I've always thought that way back at the start of CAD, the National Bureau of Standards should have specified a file format and said "If you want to interact with the US Gov't, your documents must be in this format".

      -- gewg_