Electric VLSI Design System is a free to use EDA tool, developed by Steven M. Rubin in the early 1980s. The tool is written in Java. One can draw schematics and layouts of integrated circuits using this tool. Industries and academic institutes generally use tools like Cadence or Mentor Graphics for schematic and layout purpose. But these tools are very expensive. If you do not have access to such costly tools, then you can use Electric for both schematic and layout purposes. This is a very good tool from academic point of view where we mostly need to build the circuit for learning purpose. Electric can also handle VHDL and Verilog. It has several analysis and synthesis tools like Design Rule Checking (DRC), Simulation, Routing, Layout vs. Schematic (LVS), Logical Effort etc.
Special Mentions:
Dr. Steven M. Rubin : Thank you, Dr. Steven for developing Electric. Electric (an open-source Computer-Aided Design program) is used all over the world as the EDA tool to design integrated-circuit chips.
Prof. R. Jacob Baker and his students : Dr. Baker is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He and his students have prepared very nice tutorials for learning Electric. Most of the contents in our initial design tutorials and the Electric tool use flow have been extracted from Dr. Baker’s tutorials and placed here in a little more organized way. Thank you, Professor Baker for preparing such nice tutorials.
Tutorial Book on Electric
1. Getting Started with Electric
2. Starting and Setting-up Electric
4. Setup of LTspice with Electric
5. Design_1: Resistive Divider Circuit
5.1. Creating Resistor Schematic
5.4. Layout vs. Schematic (LVS)
5.5. Electrical Rule Check (ERC)
5.6. Resistive Divider Schematic