Executing Linux-Based Software of Electronic Design Automation on Windows Platform of Microsoft
Due to developing history of EDA tools, current mainstream EDA tools are almost developed on Linux or UNIX. This chapter is a study of discovering some methods or techniques to execute such UNIX-based EDA tools on Microsoft Windows platform without rewrit
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Abstract Due to developing history of EDA tools, current mainstream EDA tools are almost developed on Linux or UNIX. This chapter is a study of discovering some methods or techniques to execute such UNIX-based EDA tools on Microsoft Windows platform without rewriting the entire program. In this chapter, XCircuit, an electrical circuit schematic drawing program executing on UNIX, will be put into experiment for discovering a way to execute the program on Microsoft Windows platform. XCircuit is an open-source program and authorized by General Public License (GPL). This can avoid some problems that may be caused by proprietary software. XCircuit is expected to port and execute on Microsoft Windows XP during the porting experiment in this chapter. Keywords EDA • GPL • UNIX
1 Introduction The introduction will review the developing history of electronic design automation (EDA) accompanied by the history of computing hardware.
1.1
EDA in Early Days
Around 1970, a period where mainframes were used as major computing hardware, the earliest tools of EDA had been produced academically and introduced to the H.-J. Wang (*) • Z.-M. Lin Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Changhua University of Education, Changhua 50007, Taiwan e-mail: [email protected] J. Juang and Y.-C. Huang (eds.), Intelligent Technologies and Engineering Systems, Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering 234, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-6747-2_72, # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
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world in the public domain. One of the most famous tools was produced by the University of California, Berkeley, the “Berkeley VLSI Tools Tarball,” a set of UNIX utilities used to design early VLSI systems [1].
1.2
Midterm Development of EDA
After decades of development in computing hardware, EDA tools were still developed, maintained, and used on mainframes, minicomputers, or workstations, the high-end microcomputers designed for technical or scientific applications. This began to change in the year 2005. Intel and AMD, the top two leading manufacturers of microprocessors, introduced the multi-core microprocessor, which is used by normal personal computers, of their own.
1.3
Recent Development of EDA
After multi-core microprocessors were introduced to the market by Intel and AMD and recent developments of advanced manufacturing process of very-large-scale integration (VLSI), which is perfectly predicted by the well-known Moore’s law, the computing performance of normal personal computers is finally competitive with workstations. This change does break the gap between normal personal computers and high-end personal computers, the workstations. This gives a chance for the developers to develop their EDA tools on normal personal computers. Besides, people can have more chances of obtaining and using these EDA tools since normal personal computers are widespread nowadays. Before this, no matter mainframes, minicomputers, or even workstations, they were never affordable for normal people ot
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