ASCO is a SPICE circuit optimizer used to design high performance analog low-power low-voltage circuits for mobile communications. The key features of the ASCO tool are:

• Simulator independent: currently out-of-the-box support for Eldo (TM), HSPICE (R), LTSpice (TM), Spectre (R) and Qucs exist. More are to be included in future releases.
• Number of variables: there is, in theory, no limit to the number of circuit variables that can be optimized, except those constraints imposed by the available computer memory and/or the time required to generate a functional circuit. It is currently hardcoded in the C code.
• PVT corners: by using the simulator functionality, the possibility to test various design corners and Monte Carlo analysis is only limited to the simulator capability and by the time it takes to finish the optimization.
• Efficiency: the optimization algorithm features a global optimization using differential evolution. It has been used on a variety of applications and is know to produce good results in an acceptable time.
• Within the supported SPICE simulators, arbitrary netlist can be optimized on different conditions without having to recompile the code.
• File format: all outputted data and log information is stored in plain text format. This guarantees that they will be always readable in the future. In addition, it makes possible to use other existing tools to post-process the optimization results.

Update

zamiaCAD - Open Source Platform for Advanced Hardware Design

zamiaCAD is a modular and extensible platform for advanced hardware design, analysis, and research. Its core components are the language independent instantiation graph (IG) data structure, the language dependent frontends generating an IG, and applications working on the IG data structure. The frontends consist of a parser and an elaboration engine. Currently, VHDL has a complete frontend, Verilog only has a parser. Applications like a simulator and an eclipse GUI are built on top of the IG and potentially language dependent structures like the abstract syntax tree. Currently, the zamiaCAD platform consists of more than 200k lines of Java code. More details

There are three user categories of the zamiaCAD platform:

• developers writing EDA tools
• endusers using EDA tools coming with the platfrom
• researches prototyping research algorithms

The most important zamiaCAD features are

• IDE for VHDL: eclipse plugin, code is scalable and has handled very large industrial designs, usable, if prepared to report bugs. For details, see the tutorial for details
• Simulator support: with external simulator and vcd files, usable to display waveform and relate values to source code. A complete, standards-compliant built-in simulator is under development. While it is not complete yet and has not been tuned for performance, it already offers very quick startup and turnaround times and is a key tool providing for quick, interactive development of smaller hardware designs and cores.
• Synthesis: Code for generating RTL graph is currently under early development

The zamiaCAD project currently aims for

• EDA developers and researchers participating in the development of the project
• Testers working with the zamiaCAD IDE, thus testing zamia platform and applications, and willing to write bugreports with small VHDL testcases showing the problems
• Companies looking for commercial support and development for the zamiaCAD platform or tools

To participate in the project please contact us through the mailing lists, through the forums, or through our support mail address, see the contact page

Feedback of any kind is very welcome.

Update
Updated FST library support.

Update

There are many "firsts" in this release of Electric:

• This is the first release of Electric from Oracle.
• This is the first release of Electric that uses the Maven build system to ensure that all dependencies are found.
• This is the first release of Electric as a Java Web Start application.
• This is the first release of Electric that offers access to the developer's source code repository.
• This is the first release of Electric that includes Scala code as well as Java code.

Also new in this release are multithreaded Routing tools from the University of Karlsruhe.