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That's right, Electric is open source!
You can download Electric from the web for free.
There is no better way to get to know a CAD system than to use
it for a while.
Now you can use it at no charge!
If you like it, keep it!
If you don't, you've lost nothing.
Why are we doing this?
Because we believe that software should not be proprietary, and we want everyone to be able
to use Electric.
The Java distribution consists of a single ".jar" file that will run on any platform with Java 1.5 or later (available from Sun Microsystems or Apache Harmony). You can get a ".jar" file with or without source code (the source version is larger). Both versions have the built-in user's manual, supporting libraries, and binary code, so they are ready to run. The source version also is available for Java 1.5 systems.
The binary distribution is 9 megabytes in size, and the source distribution is 13 megabytes in size. For specific information about running Electric on your system, read the setup manual page.
The distributions are located on the Free Software Foundation (GNU) web pages. You can read about downloading Electric there, or you can...
...from the main GNU FTP area now. If this server is busy, check the list of mirrors and find Electric locally.
Due to copyright restrictions, GNU is unable to distribute those parts of Electric that come from external sources. Therefore, these facilities must be downloaded separately. After downloading the main Electric distribution from GNU, you can download these extras (none of which are necessary):
- Bean Shell A package for evaluating Java expressions.
- Java3D Enables 3D display.
- Java Media Framework Enables animation capture of the 3D display.
- IRSIM A simulator from Stanford.
- Experimental NCC Adds a new network consistency checker called the Port Interchange Experiment.
- 3D controller Gives the 3D display a more powerful rotation controller (requires Java3D).
- Animation Capture Adds animation capture to the 3D display facility (requires Java3D and JMF).
- Russian user's manual Adds a built-in user's manual in Russian (for version 8.02).
Finally, Static Free Software has some additional circuitry examples, all built with Electric:
- The "qThree" chip. This chip was designed at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. It has over 1 million transistors and was used to measure on-chip and inter-chip capacitance structures.
- 32-bit MIPS microprocessor and associated Standard Cell Library. Both the cell library and the 32-bit MIPS microprocessor were designed by students at Harvey Mudd College. See their project site for more information.
Electric used to be written in C, but was translated to Java. If you insist on the older, buggier, and uglier C code, read on.
The C source code can be compiled and run on UNIX (all variants), Macintosh (system 7 or higher), and Windows (9x/ME/NT/2000/XP). In addition, the distribution includes the user's manual (in HTML) and supporting data files (libraries, samples, etc.)
The Electric distribution is about 4 megabytes in size. It is a UNIX "tar" format file that has been "gzip"ed. For specific information about getting Electric running on your system, read the installation manual pages for UNIX, Macintosh, and Windows.
The distribution is located on the Free Software Foundation (GNU) web pages. You can read about downloading Electric there, or you can...
...from the main GNU FTP area now. If this server is busy, check the list of mirrors and find Electric locally.
Due to copyright restrictions, GNU is unable to distribute the IRSIM simulation engine, the Lisp language interpreter, and other extensions. Therefore, these facilities must be downloaded separately. After downloading the main Electric distribution from GNU, these Static Free Software extras can be found here.
Please note that these free distributions are controlled by the GNU General Public License (GPL), which requires you to make your source changes freely available when you redistribute the system. Static Free Software also offers proprietary licenses with different rights (email us for more information).