Kicad 6: new feature review for open source EDA tool
techexplorations.com
techexplorations.com
One of the things that KiCAD is doing to making a legitimate open framework for eCAD design. Not surprisingly, back in the 80's when the "CAD Framework Initiative" started up and everyone was going to be able to mix and match CAD components a bunch of CAD vendors got scared and inundated the standards effort with people whose job was to derail the effort. They were successful.
In the years following, any time a CAD package that was "free" or low price became reasonably competitive, one of the existing CAD vendors would buy out the developers and quietly smother it or turn it into a feeder for their "real" product.
That KiCAD has lasted this long is pretty cool. I suspect it has enough momentum that it cannot be stopped now but I'm still expecting interference from the big CAD vendor types.
CAD is hard, and it’s very hard to displace the incumbents, for the same reason that is hard to change programming languages, people have too much tied up in the old option.
Most of the free/open source alternatives were built by part providers (Mouser, Farnell,..). The objective was clear, if your CAD has direct links to your site, this will probably make you the default provider. It was a good plan, until they realized how hard CAD really is. After burning tones of cash, they sold them for pennies on the dollar to the only people that wanted them, companies like Autodesk that think they can make them financially viable.
I’ve been waiting for this release for quite some time, KiCAD is powerful enough, but I found KiCAD 5 very non-ergonomic, and supposedly KiCAD 6 has a better UI.
It was sold to me as "what blender did last time", which is music to my ears.
Nah fam, I'm seeing my favorite tools like Netfabb disappear and become subscription-only parts of the Autodesk ecosystem.
CAD is not just EDA, or the niche that KiCAD occupies.
I don't know how this fits into the narrative, but Protel, which started as an affordable, very good option continued to improve and is now Altium.
KiCAD is very good for an open-source tool that can produce basic PCBs. However, modern paid CAD tools are on a different level entirely. The differences may not be obvious for simple boards with low speed connections, but it’s a world of difference to use one of the high end CAD tools on a complex board with high speed traces.
KiCAD has recently reached a point where I feel like I can execute most of the designs I want with enough effort expenditure, but the paid tools still make certain tasks much faster and easier.
Kicad is all I need and probably will ever need.
I get that better tools could help do some stuff but, realistically, great majority of work is outside of kicad (like learning, searching for parts, debugging, etc.) Even within kicad I spent most of the time thinking and tinkering with the schematics. So, according to Amdahl's law, there is very little I can gain upgrading Kicad to something else assuming it actually could make me more productive.
If you are pro and you can do that other stuff quickly and efficiently and EDA is majority of your work then, maybe the calculation is different. But I just can't imagine an amateur could benefit a lot.
I am calculating stuff by hand and/or building prototypes (especially when I can't calculate). Sometimes I use Matlab to visualize something I have calculated.
We've been closely tracking the releases, and, at this point, our layout tech prefers using Kicad over another (proprietary) tool for the majority of layouts - so much so that's she's pushing for us to port all our designs to it.
I really want to believe KiCAD is there...but when billable labor rates are $150+/hr, and a single iteration of that complexity can easily burn US$10k+/ea in one-off prototype quantities + 4-6 month slip for manufacturing, assembly, reintegration, and verification testing, all of a sudden (free == cost-effective ?) becomes a very real risk consideration...never mind that I've yet to engage a customer that was willing to subsidize my development budget based on technical decision to assume a tool risk because it makes the cost of doing business marginally cheaper for me.
Open source tooling is about having indefinite access to your entire tool chain, including the ability to fix or modify it.
Not all of them. I personally chose Kicad 5 over Eagle because Eagle's UX was a pain to use. I just never found any advantages over Kicad despite a few clunky parts of the Kicad 5 the overall experience in Kicad was just more productive. Of course, most of my designs have been sub-10MHz with a few 25-50 MHz Ethernet parts.
Statements like this just leave me wondering what useful features the high end software provides that are really missing? Do they automatically re-tune differential pairs after you move things around? Many companies still seem to have separate people or software for doing BOM management so it'd seem they're not superior in that aspect either. Just feels like I'm missing something.
> The differences may not be obvious for simple boards with low speed connections, but it’s a world of difference to use one of the high end CAD tools on a complex board with high speed traces.
That covers a significant amount of the board practical PCB's that are needed for a lot of projects. Still I've been told Altium and such are much better for high speed signals, but also been told that Altium _doesn't_ do 2.5D or signal simulation and that you need to goto the next tier of commercial vendors.
Yes, in fact they can length re-rematch groups of differential pairs.
Altium does not have built in SI analysis, but it does have optional DC PI analysis, and likely AC in the future.
Most SI and PI are point tools anyway, so even if you use Cadence, it’s not built-in, rather requires importing into another tool.
No, not really. KiCAD is more than adequate for DC to GHz range circuitry. Add to that being able to develop custom tools in Python and we are at a point where there's almost no comparison --in favor of KiCAD.
For context, we were doing GHz-speed boards with PCAD back in the dark ages (20 years ago? Can't remember). As someone else mentioned, you work with your board house for controlled impedance manufacturing. Not that big of a deal. Also, you have to understand the subject or it won't go well, no matter what magic and pixie dust the EDA tool might offer. If the designer does not understand transmission lines, software isn't going to save you.
The same is true for power distribution systems. Just 'cause chips are connected to the various voltages on the board it does not mean anything is going to work. PDS design is a subject in and of itself. You can't just throw a bunch of 0.1 µF capacitors at the problem and expect things to work. Much as is the case with transmission lines, when it comes to power distribution for high speed designs, you have to know what you are doing.
We are very seriously considering migrating away from Altium Designer to KiCAD. I spent a good portion of the last couple of weeks taking a look at this in detail.
I am sick and tired of paying thousands of dollars per year to maintain our licenses only to see them pile-on the bugs. Altium has been focusing so much on trying to find a buyer for the company that they have actually done damage to the product and the user base.
For example, nobody I know has any interest in anything involving the cloud when it comes to EDA. Nobody. It is interesting to note that, if you work in an ITAR environment, today, given software realities, KiCAD is far more secure than Altium. I cannot, with a straight face, approach our clients and tell them that Altium Designer isn't reaching outside our network without air-gapping the system. With KiCAD, I can issue such a statement with absolute certainty.
Here's another one: Nobody who knows what they are doing would ever use schematic symbols and PCB footprints from a library. I don't care where they came from. This means libraries have nearly zero value (or negative value) for serious design work. You have to make all of your own symbols and PCB footprints in-house and qualify them for your designs.
Here's an interesting KiCAD advantage: I can actually ship the entire EDA tool with the design. Clients can archive all of it, software and design. That is powerful.
If we make the transition (very likely) we will our annual Altium maintenance fees to the KiCAD organization. For me this isn't about getting free software at all. I prefer to pay for software because it generally means it will be well supported. However, that changes rapidly once it become obvious that the company isn't using the money to actually work on what matters most. By supporting KiCAD financially I would help ensure it keeps moving in the right direction.
Oh, yeah, and code. We can definitely help with plugins and maybe even some main application development or bug-stomping. It would be fun.
> Nobody who knows what they are doing would ever use schematic symbols and PCB footprints from a library.
I think this trend comes from exposure to really poor standard libraries - for example, I found Altium's libraries being especially inconsistent and weird (though it's been a few years since I've last used Altium).
I've personally found the KiCAD standard libraries to be very consistent and high quality in comparison (both the symbols and footprints), and have no problem using them on my own designs - in fact, if I have to make my own schematic symbol, I often reference the standard libraries' design rules when making it.
Adding to TD-Linux's answer...
Process variants can create situation where board reliability might be negatively affected by boilerplate PCB patterns. Yes, while things have gotten better over time, you cannot trust anything in any library without, at a minimum, a full check. And, frankly, if you are going to do that, you might as well create your own symbols and PCB patterns.
If you work in aerospace or anything where high reliability is a must, you simply cannot use stock PCB patterns. Everything has to be process qualified and tested. At the extremes you have thermal cycling and vibration testing. High acceleration can rip components right off PCB.
There are other considerations. For example, most library schematic symbols have pins arranged in some fashion that made sense to whoever did the work. This can easily lead to truly convoluted schematics that are the equivalent of spaghetti code. Arranging and spacing pins according to the design one is working on can result in very clean and easy to understand schematics. This can be especially true of analog electronics.
Another case is FPGA's. If you approach FPGA symbols in a generic per-bank style, you can end-up with, again, schematics that are a rats nest nobody can follow. If, on the other hand, you create symbols in the context of the design, things can be massively easier to work with and understand.
Yes, that means you don't use the same symbol for every design. We have created tools to manage this effortlessly. As we transition to KiCAD we are likely to port these over from Altium's VBA to Python and open source them.
Bottom line: The potential liability of delivering a design that fails because you used a third party library can be costly. People with experience have learned this is a false economy. It simply isn't worth the potential consequences, from having to redo boards to product failing in the field.
That said, for quick "non flight-qualified" prototypes and hobby projects, sure.
Reminds of me of the time a friend and I were working on copy for a marketing site (we're both engineers) and we started out with a long sentence and kept removing words until we had just one word... like "box" or "apple" or something like that when originally it was like as long as my comment...
> any time a CAD package that was "free" or low price became reasonably competitive, one of the existing CAD
> vendors would buy out the developers and quietly smother it or turn it into a feeder for their "real" product.
Say what you will about RMS's personality, he was a genius at foreseeing what could be and developing tools robust enough to combat the best funded legal and social attacks.
We poisoned pilled KiCad even further by getting it trademarked under the Linux Foundation. That's a whole extra layer of protection.
Oh thank god. Now if only I could automatically import and upgrade all my old projects with missing libraries seemlessly... or can I?
"What’s next For quite some time now, people have been asking for hierarchical schematics. About equally as long, I’ve been thinking off-and-on about how to best go about implementing it. Once I made up my mind, I went ahead and implemented it over the course of about a month.
Even though the implementation is mostly done by now, I decided to not include it into this release so it receives some more testing by a wider audience. Apart from that, this results in version “H” bringing support for hierarchical schematics."
https://blog.horizon-eda.org/progress/2021/09/06/progress-20...
Easy EDA still seems like the best for most projects.
I ended up doing my own fork of the library while parts were still stuck in the PR process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDIF
At least for netlists, it is a popular format.
Sexp's are a step forward, but they are still only half of a standard. Charsets and escaping rules need to be defined, etc..
I have an old board I'd like to revise slightly, but it's too much work and risk to convert to the new "interactive" (i.e. manual) routing system.
According to this : https://freerouting.org/freerouting/using-with-kicad it should still work as it did long time ago.
What I do remember is that the author of freerouting.org was harassed by his (former?) employer.
You can still use the old auto router, you just have to do it manually (export, route, import).
How I do placement now: deleting part of my schematics, then copying the remaining components to the PCB layout, then undoing to get my schematics back, delete another part of the schematics, etc.
Regarding a graphics tablet: I've thought about it, but then I miss the scroll-wheel which is absolutely necessary for zooming in/out. Are there tablets with scroll wheels?
I've not tried Altium's autoplacer, but its autorouter is crap. I bought into PADS in the 90s (it was better than Protel, but not as expensive as OrCAD PCB). It used Specctra and then their own Blaze router. Both were excellent. I can not believe how bad Altium's autorouter still is (it leaves your board full of drc errors including shorts).
It is difficult to convey how well auto-routers can work to people who are used to manually routing boards in Altium because of it's broken auto-router. Seriously you hit the auto-route button, and a few minutes later it's done. You do want to ensure you have good constraints, all of the work is there, and it's a good idea to have them even when manually routing. It's very feasible to move parts around and do trial full routes to help find the best placement.
PADS did have an autoplacer, but it did not work very well as I remember.
However, I've been contemplating the idea of creating a smarter auto-placement for new boards where it'd take the relative positions on the schematic into account. As in taking the relative distances of parts on the schematic, probably using a weighted heuristic / k-means to determine part clusters.
That'd be about 80% of what I'd want from a full auto-router. The new S-Expression eschema format should make it almost trivial to do as an external program. I tried on the old format and it was way to difficult to parse. Though if the Python API's really have been updated then it could be made into a plugin.
For relatively insensitive signals, or when you can constrain the layout with rough guidance to something that should easily pass signal integrity, this technology makes it so you can go get lunch while the computer gets a decent layout that you'd typically check before sending it off to the prototype fab or get started on quickly running one in-house (for that <2h turn-around from layout to power-on, including printing and soldering).
If I need something more complex very quickly, I usually do some combination of hot gluing and cutting up dev boards and dead-bugging.
Someone who tends to only use the autorouter in a bad way probably wouldn't do much better doing it by hand anyway as they wouldn't be aware of the pitfalls.
They'd still end up with 500 vias, traces all over the place, bad placement and not doing any pinswapping anyway
1. It was written in Java. We do not have any java devs nor any interest in learning that language. Nobody else has stepped up, period. Most of us develop from professional experience and Java simply isn't part of that.
2. The autorouter was never embedded in KiCad due to being java. It was a command line utility. It's behavior and/or bugs varied as a result.
3. ***The absolute biggest issue.*** The autorouter has broken licensing status. The author of it was sued by his company for writing it on company time/knowledge/NDA and they claimed ownership of it. We cannot legally bundle it because it's copyright status is essentially disputed by a legal entity with piles of money. That author also disappeared when he got sued. Somebody attempted to fork it but they also gave up years ago because autorouters are.....
4. Autorouters are a beast of work and a full time job in of themselves to ensure they work. You can create simple solvers but they quickly break down once you add more and more traces and constraints. There are even companies that offer autorouting services now as an example of just how much work is involved in doing it right.
We decided our time is best spent elsewhere. We wouldn't stop someone if they came up and developed a new autorouter from scratch to contribute, but nobody has and we have limited man power. We are a niche group. We are Electrical Engineering backgrounded using our intense experience and industry connections to write a tool for ourselves and others. This is well beyond the interests of comp sci code monkeys to get manpower as easily as leftpad on github ;)
I created a set of small boards and had them SMT-assembled for <$100 shipped. Tools and services for hobbyists have come a long way in the past decade or so.
(the other stuff on his channel is good, too)
I work with some Orcad designers who view it as a necessary feature for the style of schematics that they draw. They feel like forced-hierarchical is arbitrary and high friction, but also don't want to throw a complex design onto one giant sheet.
KiCad's multi-sheet schematic is hierarchical. There is one root sheet and beyond that the structure is flexible.
Do you have an example multi-sheet schematic as you'd like to be able to have in KiCad?
https://digilent.com/reference/_media/reference/programmable...
There's no hierarchy to the schematic. Pages are inserted/deleted in a freeform way, the same as you'd do with a Word document. Reference designators are in a global namespace, and so are net names.
It feels like it's a pretty common drafting style, at least in my corner of the world. I've worked at two companies that use this style, and I also see it a fair amount on reference-designs like the linked example.
1. Ability to produce several PCB layouts from the same schematic (e.g. right-to-left and left-to-right, I needed this a couple of times to accommodate different chassis)
2. Ability to have "outboard" circuit fragments (i.e. a set of panel mounted pots interconnected with wires, or a sub-board that's logically a part of the same circuit).
Neither of which seems to be there, unless the review forgot to mention them. Unfortunate, but still there's a significant number of updates that make upgrading worthwhile once the release stabilizes.
Real-time Netlisting in KiCad [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27367414 - June 2021 (27 comments)
Making a Timelapse of your PCB design in KiCad - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22355847 - Feb 2020 (9 comments)
KiCad Joins Linux Foundation to Advance Electronic Design Automation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21619542 - Nov 2019 (49 comments)
Why open hardware needs open software - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21388220 - Oct 2019 (29 comments)
KiCad 5.1.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19456152 - March 2019 (35 comments)
Start with Kicad – Schematic Diagram - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18969124 - Jan 2019 (2 comments)
KiCad 5 – A New Generation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17594677 - July 2018 (2 comments)
Convert your KiCAD boards into nice looking 2D pinout diagrams - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14122958 - April 2017 (1 comment)
How to translate your Eagle libraries to KiCad - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13573567 - Feb 2017 (1 comment)
KiCad: A commitment to freedom - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12713089 - Oct 2016 (83 comments)
Tutorial On Designing/Building A PCB (Using FOSS) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11670498 - May 2016 (41 comments)
KiCad 4.0.0 is Out - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10676514 - Dec 2015 (37 comments)
Design for Assembly in KiCad - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8399815 - Oct 2014 (11 comments)
KiCad videos released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8153324 - Aug 2014 (10 comments)
KiCAD a Free and Open Source EDA Tool - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315852 - Sept 2008 (1 comment)
Some of the improvements look universally great (especially sweet & simple ones like the ratsnest improvement) others will slightly alienate the current users but hopefully make the program feel more familiar to first time users.
Has that gotten better in recent versions and it is worth another go?
For digital or systems simulation there's Renode. You have to recreate the system in Renode,there's no Kicad integration.
I haven't looked in a few years, but you'll likely be hard-pressed to find an open source simulator that will give you analog, pure digital, "real" digital (logic with slew/noise/nonlinearities), electromagnetic, and thermal simulations plus usability.
ANSYS is a well-established professional simulation suite and doesn't even really meet the usability threshold, in my opinion.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploratory_data_analysis