gEDA-dev: Google summer of code

[David Baird]

On 3/4/07, Dan McMahill <dan at mcmahill.net> wrote:
> David Baird wrote:
> > I've been interested in doing something like this, possibly bringing
> > in other representations of an electronic component such as SPICE
> > models and using something like OWL (Web Ontology Language) to relate
> > the various different representations of a component.
>
> I think designing the tool up front to explicitly deal with and support
> 2 different back end flows (layout and simulation in this case) is very
> important.  Presumably that will be a good vehicle to making sure it can
> extend to many back end flows.  I think that is the only way to go,
> otherwise you end up with a real headache trying to make simulation
> netlists work right and maintain decent footprint selection.

I'm excited to see that there is interest in such a system.  That
motivates me to start working on it.  For over a year, I've been
thinking (maybe just dreaming?) about an extensible system which
allows the representation of information which has not yet even been
envisioned, while also providing forwards and backwards compatibility
as new component representations are devised.  For these reasons, OWL
struck me somewhat and now I am learning OWL and trying to see if I
can really make it do what I want.

I hope that such libraries and formats can also provide high-level
information to computer programs that has been previously not
possible.  A simple example of such "high-level information" could be
to convey to a PCB program that a set of nets are actually grouped
together to form the address bus of a microprocessor system.
Information like that could be used to constrain the autorouter (e.g.
make all the bus lines parallel to each other).  I have yet to
actually implement anything like this though, so I'll restrain from
giving too many speculative examples right now.

-David