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by triactual 316 days ago
If you read the article, you will see that the technology is specifically semiconductor design tools required for developing high performance computing that the PRC would use for nuclear weapons development. Can you do that with KiCAD? No.
2 comments
ipdashc 316 days ago
KiCAD might not be a great example, but you could with something like https://github.com/The-OpenROAD-Project/OpenROAD (or roughly along those lines - I'm not a hardware person), no?

The parent's question still seems applicable. Is this basically down to a judge to decide the line at which a certain technology is too advanced to export? Would open sourcing an EDA tool be illegal if it was sufficiently capable?

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mindslight 316 days ago
Licensing as "open source" wouldn't be illegal, but the act of exporting would be. I've certainly seen libre software downloads that have click-throughs where you attest you're not in certain prohibited countries, IP blocks (eg Github does this site-wide AFAIK), etc. No idea if this will continue to be "enough" under this new fascist regime that doesn't care much for institutions like the rule of law. Probably fine up until it isn't, at which point ceasing and desisting would probably be enough unless you're deemed "woke" or some other kind of unperson.

(I'm not a member of any guilds. And I guess the downvote is for the political incorrectness. Plus ça change)

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akersten 316 days ago
> specifically semiconductor design tools required for developing high performance computing

I call that EDA for brevity

> Can you do that with KiCAD?

Yes, depending how you define "high performance computing" (my question here)

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Cyph0n 316 days ago
Isn’t KiCAD limited to PCB design, or is my understanding out of date?

Cadence tooling is for end-to-end electronics design - from transistor/standard cell up to PCB.

So technically they’re both EDA tools, but one is in another league as far as sophistication goes.

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AlotOfReading 316 days ago
People have hacked kicad into doing layout with the e.g. skywater 130 PDK. I wouldn't recommend it, but it's possible.

There's a whole lot more to an EDA tool than just layout or running spice though.

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