KiCad EDA Software Suite

Download KiCad

KiCad is an open source software suite for electronic design automation (EDA). It facilitates the design of schematics for electronic circuits and their conversion to PCBs (printed circuit board) design. KiCad was developed by Jean-Pierre Charras, and features an integrated environment for schematic capture and PCB layout design. Tools exist within the package to create a bill of materials, artwork and Gerber files, and 3D views of the PCB and its components.

Parts

KiCad software is organized in five main parts:

kicad - the project manager.
eeschema - the schematic capture editor.
cvpcb - the footprint selector for components used in the circuit design.
pcbnew - the PCB layout program. It also has 3D View.
gerbview - the Gerber (photoplotter documents) viewer.

Features

KiCad uses an integrated environment for all of the stages of the design process: Schematic Capture, PCB layout, Gerber file generation/visualization and library editing.

KiCad is cross-platform, written with WxWidgets to run on FreeBSD, Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Many component libraries are available, and users can add custom components. The custom components can be available on a per-project basis, or installed for use in any project. There are also tools to help with importing components from other EDA applications, for instance Eagle. Configuration files are in well documented plain text. This fact helps with interfacing to CVS's or SVN and with making automated component generation scripts.

Multiple languages are supported, such as English, Catalan, Czech, German, Greek, Spanish, Finnish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovene, Swedish, and Chinese.

The 3D PCB viewing function is implemented with the Wings3D subdivision modeler.

KiCad has a built-in basic autorouter. Alternatively, the freeware java-based FreeRouting can be used. To do that, a PCB design is exported to a Specctra DSN file, which is then loaded into FreeRouting. After the autorouting is done, the result is saved as a Specctra session and imported back into KiCad's pcbnew module.

Extracted from Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KiCAD