[baybal2]

Schematics to gerber flow will gain a lot it real, practical to use versioning will be there.

I'm all for for making PCB design akin to software development.

Moreover, I believe there is an opening for HLS like language for board design to unify schematics and spice space.

I looked into EDA Solver, I looked into SkiDL.

SkiDL seems to be a bit more alive, and ready for practical use.

[usamaabid]

Definitely, we are leaning towards gerber support with gerber generator, sharing and viewing in web.

With regards to HLS like language, our next step over the year will be creating a universal and open format parser to translate designs back and forth between multiple formats and eventually getting it editable using a language, modular visual editor or a complete circuit editor in the cloud.

Have looked into SkiDL definitely a great tool, will explore more and would love to hear your thoughts more on this as to how we should approach this further.

[baybal2]

> Have looked into SkiDL definitely a great tool, will explore more and would love to hear your thoughts more on this as to how we should approach this further.

I myself don't have an idea how to best implement it. Just only one thing in certain is that modern EDA GUI tools, with, or without automation are disastrously bad at things software devs get for granted: clear, and illustrative record of changes, branching, and merging of work, "Do-Not-Repeat-Yourself," easy design reuse, scripting, and automation, intellisense, and a lot of contextual information, etc.

Some people start with board design, and make schematics from it, some start from the other side, schematics, and PCB design made from it.

The challenge in later is that you need much more than netlist to make a PCB, and having it automated will be very far from trivial, needing a mechanical CAD like constraint system, and OOP + log based data structure (lookup Solidworks.)

It's much easier to get netlist in reverse, from the PCB design, but then you loose programability.

KiCAD is pretty much the one, and only serious open source EDA, so further direction of work will depend on what the KiCAD devs think. My advise, get in touch with them.

I think the biggest challenge will be assuring reverse propagation of changes, so SkiDL code can be modified by manual changes to the netlist, and tools further down stream like board design.

[baybal2]

Take a look what people said about git-ing EDA files https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRwTyBX2BFk

[baybal2]

Another thing I want to see is some kind of electronic components Wiki database accessible through some high performance API that can be on-line accessible by EDAs.