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Comment by cushychicken | Hacker News Reader

I've never used Altium, but my opinion of most EE CAD software is pretty low. Unintuitive, proprietary, a pain in the ass to configure, and capping it all, usually ugly. (I primarily use Cadence, however, so there might be something great out there I don't know about.) I think now's a time for a radical re-imagining of EE CAD software. I just don't know how you would do it. :D

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I use Altium every day for board layouts and schematics.

It is a fantastic software package - worth every penny, and easily affordable to small-to-medium businesses.

I'll bet they have 100+ programmers constantly improving their product. Every version is more powerful and easier to use.

No way for a small startup to compete with that without charging a similar amount. And even then, Altium has a 20 year head-start.

Well, I'm not thinking about a startup, but open source projects. You could have said the same thing about any of the commercial unix vendors in the early 90s -- they had a 15 year head start, hundreds of programmers, etc. And look where we are now. What could things look like in 20 years?

One of the big challenges as I see it with EDA tools- the target moves quickly. In silicon development, for example, suddenly all your customers want double-patterning support in your tools as they move to today's tiny process nodes. [0] Or, perhaps, your customers now need layer-aware optimization, again for recent processes. [1] You have to accommodate this very quickly. An ASIC program runs for a year or three, so your EDA tools need to add & mature these new features in a very short timeframe. (Well, the feature doesn't have to be mature right away, but it does have to work) This means it's a hard environment to compete in. You could develop an open-source offering to compete, but without very significant resources your tools will always be missing support for modern processes.

[0]: http://www.techdesignforums.com/practice/guides/double-patte...

[1]: http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1279842

On a completely separate angle, compiling & optimization is basically the biggest Packing Problem you've ever faced, with several dimensions of "packing". You need some very smart people to hope to produce good results. But I've written enough for now.

I agree that's true for chip design tools, but I was mostly thinking board-level design and above. Although I think there is opportunity in chip design for higher level tools not tied to chip design. To things spring to mind. After the Pentium fdiv bug, Intel hired the author of the HOL Light theorem prover. He formalized the FPU of a later chip. I'm also thinking of high-level synthesis tools like Arvind's Bluespec.

The problem with EDA software is that, to a first approximation, the number of users of EDA software is zero.

This is why EDA software sucks so badly. The bug discovery rate is abysmal. Couple this with the fact that the number of EDA programmers is even closer to zero, and you have a recipe for a horrible industry.

Check out fritzing it is open source and geared toward the beginner arduino crowd with some polish it could be top notch. It seems to have a lot of traction with the adafruit/sparkfun crowd.

Eagle CadSoft is also popular with that demographic.

I like Fritzing, I felt I picked it up quickly enough not to bother me. But It needs someone to update it with the latest sensors releases, or it's a case of just going through the time consuming motions of creating your own instances over and over. Anyway, I like it. I think it can be improved.

Its a babystep compared to whats needed, but we're trying to rethink EDA at upverter.com. Its a full editor thats also collaborative with lots of community features. It might be what you're looking for.

Cadence is a fine example of how horrible it can be. Its even worse going back in time to when I had to use it on a Sun Ultra 1 with Motif UI. Everything is better now.

I don't either. I'm not even an EE. I figure someone deeply embedded in the current set of tools would be best positions to see where to go next.

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