Welcome! The goal of this project is to provide open-source tools for designing electronic circuitry. These tools fall under an extremely broad title known as Electronic Design Automation(EDA). Python has been chosen as the programming language of choice for this task.
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The near-term goal of this project is a set of tools which can produce a VLSI chip. This set of tools needs to include:
This is, quite simply, a lot of work.
Not only do these goals represent a large volume of work, but they also represent a vast array of complex technical skills. Here is a small sampling of the issues in EDA tools:
From the tedious to the mind-bending--if it can be programmed, EDA uses it
If you want a challenge, come on in, grab a problem, and start coding. There will be no shortage of stuff to do here.
The developers of the Python EDA Initiative adhere to three central tenets for the code:
While the list is small, it is somewhat different from the goals of a standard open-source project. The concept of giving code maintainability a central role is unusual. The fact that user efficiency is considered important, but code efficiency is not explicitly managed also has important implications.
The Python EDA Initiative prefers to use the BSD License with the copyright being assigned to the Python EDA Initiative, Inc.
However, EDA software is unusual. The software itself is not always the product of interest. Quite often, the data produced by the software is of much higher interest and value than the EDA software itself. None of the current open source licenses recognize this distinction. A new license will probably have to be created to address these issues.