Open CAD Environment

Open CAD Environment repo is aiming to create a professional grade envionment for EE engineers to be able to use Open Source tools for IC design much easier. We use Enviroment Modules to track which verison of each tool we are using as used in the professional environments. This allow switching between different versions of the tools much easier and maintaining versions correctly.

More about Environment Modules could be found here.

Also, a video tutorial about Environment Modules could be found:

Status

Originally, we internally used to support all tools. But due rapid change in building process for tools, we were not able to keep up. I stipped down the list of tools to a target set of tools. Currently, we only support the following list of tools:

klayout
ngspice
magic
netgen

Please try to contribute to this project if you can. We are opening this to the community to allow easier management of tools.

Testing

This has been tested on Ubuntu 22.04. We appreciate if you could test on different environments.

Installation

You must first must install all the libraries necessary for building all tools from scratch. To do that you need to do the following:

git clone https://github.com/mabrains/OpenCadEnv.git
cd OpenCadEnv
sudo bash ./install_libraries.sh

By default, the build process will build inside:

/home/$USER/ic-tools

You could change the location of tools, by changing that path like this:

export ENV_PATH=<path_of_installation>

You must add the following lines at the bottom of your .bashrc to be able to use this environment:

export ENV_PATH=<path_of_installation>
source /usr/share/modules/init/bash
module use --append $ENV_PATH/modulefiles

If you are using the default location of installation, you could just copy the following:

export ENV_PATH=/home/$USER/ic-tools
source /usr/share/modules/init/bash
module use --append $ENV_PATH/modulefiles

How to use this repo and install any tool version you want:

To install a tool with a specific version, you could do something like:

make build_klayout-v0.28.3

You could change the version of the tool and the version in the make command like:

make build_ngspice-38

How to use environment modules

Once everything is installed, you could now see all the versions of all the tools installed using the following command:

module avail

Example output:

To load a tool in your environment:

module load klayout/v0.28.7

Example output

To unload a tool in your environment:

module unload klayout/v0.28.7

Example output