Re: gEDA-user: Question

["Samuel A. Falvo II" <sam.falvo@falvotech.com>]

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