Three recent open-source offerings are Jeda, a C-like verification language; ChipVault, an HDL project-management tool; and the "TCL for EDA" project, which includes TCL-based tools and scripts. All have been created by engineers on their own, in contrast to previous open-source offerings from universities or companies.

Like all open-source tools, these offerings come with minimal support. No EDA applications engineer will show up at your facility and run benchmarks. No hot line will help you resolve a problem. But the price is right, and you have the code to rework or customize as you wish.

These offerings also claim some strong capabilities. Developed by verification engineer Atsushi Kasuya, Jeda promises many features Verilog doesn't have-including an ability to fork threads dynamically, use reentrant function calls and take advantage of object-oriented programming. Kasuya thinks Jeda is better than SystemC because Jeda automatically handles garbage collection at the program level.

ChipVault, developed by ASIC designer Kevin Hubbard, provides Verilog or VHDL file organization, revision control, issue tracking, hierarchy navigation and hooks for launching EDA tools. Written in Perl, it's faster and more efficient than most commercial offerings, Hubbard said.

The TCL for EDA Web site, created by design engineer Alexander Gnusin, features scripts and tools aimed at synthesis, project management and netlist viewing. Gnusin's SynView tool offers a GUI for Synopsys' Design Compiler and claims features Synopsys doesn't offer.

Meanwhile, engineers are contributing to the FreeHDL project, which is building a VHDL simulator for Linux, and the gEDA project, which is aiming at a complete open-source EDA tool suite. The Open Collector Web site tracks these and other open-source efforts.

EDA vendors are getting into the act, too. Cadence's TestBuilder C++ environment is available on an open-source basis, as is Synopsys' OpenVera. And university-based open-source tools, such as the Alliance chip design suite, are still available.

EEdesign has an "Open Source EDA" page with links to all of the tools and projects mentioned. Contact me at rgoering@cmp.com if you'd like to suggest additions.