On Monday 12 April 2004 10:00 am, Jason Morris wrote: > Can the gEDA suite be used for designing integrated circuits? Any help > would be greatly appreciated.
Icarus Verilog is available, and is considered part of the gEDA suite of tools, although it is NOT part of "gaf." Icarus can be used to at least simulate Verilog designs. The Verilog sources can then often be sent to a chip manufacturer, where they perform the transistor-level compilation for an additional charge. But then, when you're dealing with $500K+ per fab run, that additional cost is probably a drop in the bucket. (Note: this is based on my experience from working at Hifn, Inc.) Although Icarus isn't 100% complete implementation of the Verilog language, it's *amazingly* complete for a 0.x version piece of software. I'm very, very happy with it overall. You can often prototype your ASIC designs in FPGAs or CPLDs as well. Since I can't afford a custom chip run, these are the *only* solutions available to me. Again, Verilog is used to do this. My plan is to use Icarus to simulate, then once I'm happy with it, port the Verilog sources to Xilinx or Altera's tools to compile and program the chips with. -- Samuel A. Falvo II
