One of the least advertised features of IRSIM is its ability to quickly estimate power of large VLSI circuits from gate level netlists (.sim).

To install IRSIM on Fedora (default on Fedora Electronic Lab):

# yum install irsim

This estimation is based on the

• ‘three-level quantization scheme’, where the voltage can assume 3 values (GND, VDD/2 and VDD). It is fairly more accurate than the ‘two-level rail-to-rail model’.
• measurement of glitching power.
• estimates reasonably close to those that can be derived by measuring currents with a SPICE simulator with an error of less than 20% and a speed up of about 500 times.
• incremental power measurement.

Electronic design is about design flows, rather than point software. Multiple software are needed for achievement multiple design flows.

However when one software breaks, the whole design flow becomes pointless. This is why we pay great attention to the design flows under the FEL collection.

For the real life, one might also need software for the mechanical body design. The current and widely used opensource mechanical design tool, OpenCascade suffer from licensing issues with its redistribution. The OpenMoko design team uses Heekscad. The latter requires a dependency on OpenCascade. Without OpenCascade in Fedora repositories, Heekscad will not pass Fedora package review.

This is a major blocker for anyone who wants to create a Fedora Spin for mechanical design. This licensing issue limits Fedora from shipping them.

Dia is known to seduce some system level designers and is used to describe different block levels for embedded design.

Fedora has just received some additional shapes for digital blocks which will improve user documentation experience, through neat functional diagram drawn by dia. They should reach fedora repositories in a day or two.

Installation:

# yum install dia-Digital dia-CMOS dia-electronic dia-electric2

Hello there,

On behalf of Fedora Electronic Lab team, I have the pleasure to announce the fifth consecutive release of the Fedora Electronic Lab 12 Livedvd.

This Livedvd is available for immediate download.

This release highlights Fedora’s commitment in strengthening the electronic hardware communities with an advanced Electronic Design Automation (EDA) environment. The latter

• was optimized to support OpenMoko development team.
• entails a peer review solution for hardware design.
• has Eclipse 3.5 series for VHDL/Verilog IPCores development and documentation.
• entails the latest gEDA/gaf release, openocd, simulators for 8051 microcontrollers,…
• ….

Please find in-depth details in the Release Notes and Flyer.

Website
Mailing list : fedora-electronic-lab-list [AT] redhat DOT com
Developers

Tim Edwards has tagged version 3.6 to stable, and version 3.7 is the new development version.

The stable release will only be updated with bug fixes, while all new development and experimental stuff will go into the development release.

Users will experience fast UI responses with the new stable release 3.6.163, which has just been pushed to Fedora updates. This release also unleashes extra capabilities for managing big IC projects, which was lacking in the 3.4 series.

Karen Bartleson reports some interesting facts from the 22nd EDA Interoperability forum in her blog.

Richard Paw represented the EDA Consortium’s OS Roadmap Committee. This group produces guidelines for operating system and hardware platforms that help unify EDA tool support around common platforms. (It drives customers crazy when the tools they purchase don’t support the same platforms.) The guidelines will be updated in September 2010. Added will be SLES 11 (SuSe Linux) and Windows 7. Dropped will be SLES 10. In 6 months, the committee will review Windows XP, Vista, and the upcoming RHEL 6 (RedHat Enterprise Linux).

Dave Graubart represented the EDA Consortium’s Anti-Piracy Committee. He said it’s hard to feel the love when you’re getting ripped off. The committee estimates that 1/3 of all EDA software use worldwide is pirated or overused beyond the license agreements. Not scientific data, but troubling nevertheless for the EDA industry. It’s easy to find the stolen binaries so most of the 1/3 estimate comes from this, not misuse/overuse which is harder to find. There are potential techniques to help prevent this piracy and the committee will continue its work to solve the problem.

The Fedora Electronic Lab community needs MORE packagers as its userbase is growing release after release.

We are currently a small FEL team focussing on promoting opensource software in the world of Integrated Circuit design. Our userbase’s (Fedora,CentOS&RHEL users) demand for proprietary alternatives is also proportional to our current success in effective opensource EDA software deployment.

Thereby, we are seeking new contributors and RPM packagers to close our tickets and  drive the FEL community forward.

Requirements:

• Packagers should be familiar with Fedora packaging guidelines/policies.
• We also need people to lead FEL.
• Newbies are welcome as well (Mentoring will be provided).
• Electronic design know-how is not required.

I would appreciate if you could parse on this request to anyone who might be interested in joining the team.

Currently, the tickets reflect Fedora-13’s feature list. If you are interested, please join in our mailing list. Draft spec files are also provided to help you out for your basic RPM babysteps.

Other References

• FEL 12 Release Notes
• FEL 12 Flyer

Magic VLSI is one of the core FEL packages, with which IC layout can be carried out. Since Fedora is shipping 5 additional standard cells (delays calculated by a linear delay model, also known as the prop–ramp delay model), here is a small tip how to teach Magic to deduce the location of their respective technology file:

• gedit ~/.magicrc
• copy the following text into this ~/.magicrc file

puts stdout “Processing .magicrc file”
path sys “. /usr/share/pharosc/magic/etc $CAD_ROOT/magic/sys $CAD_ROOT/magic/sys/current”

• fire up magic, you should see in the Technology Manager, additional technologies.

$CAD_ROOT variable is an Magic’s internal variable, which is /usr/lib or /usr/lib64 depending on your computer’s architecture.

The ~/.magicrc file can include any valid Tcl command. This file is also handy if the user wants to define a key shortcut or button actions. Names like “Control_XK_i” refer to key combinations. The “XK” comes from the X11 standard definitions.