KiCAD
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KiCad Layout Editor
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| Original author(s) | Jean-Pierre Charras |
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| Developer(s) | KiCad developers |
| Initial release | 1992 |
| Stable release |
4.0.6 / March 7, 2017
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| Repository | git |
| Written in | C++ |
| Operating system | FreeBSD, Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X |
| Available in | Multilingual (8) |
| Type | EDA |
| License | GNU GPL v3+ |
| Website | www |
KiCad is a free software suite for electronic design automation (EDA). It facilitates the design of schematics for electronic circuits and their conversion to PCB designs. KiCad was originally 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, Gerber files, and 3D views of the PCB and its components. KiCad's popularity is fueled by its GerbView component, used as Gerber viewer by users of other EDA software that does not support this feature such as CircuitMaker. Olimex has announced to have switched from EAGLE to KiCad as their primary EDA tool.
KiCad was created in 1992 by Jean-Pierre Charras while working at IUT de Grenoble. Since then KiCad has gained a number of both volunteer and paid contributors. Notably in 2013 the CERN BE-CO-HT section started contributing resources towards KiCad to help foster open hardware development by helping improve KiCad to be on par with commercial EDA tools.
KiCad adopted a point release versioning scheme in December 2015 starting with KiCad 4.0.0. This was the first release featuring the more advanced tools implemented by CERN developers. CERN hopes to contribute further to the development of KiCad by hiring a developer through donations. Contributions may be made through the links on KiCad's website.
The KiCad suite has five main parts:
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 a cross-platform program, written in C++ 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, which helps with interfacing version control systems, as well as with automated component generation scripts.
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