What is Chipmachine?
Chipmachine is an open-source integrated circuit (IC) design tool that provides a complete flow from schematic capture to physical layout for custom chip design and fabrication. It allows users to draw schematics, run simulations, perform physical design and layout, run design rule checks, and generate files needed to fabricate ICs through foundry services.
Some key features of Chipmachine include:
- Intuitive graphical user interface for schematic capture and layout editing
- Support for common logic gates, analog components, memories, CPUs, etc.
- Circuit simulation engine for functional verification
- Automatic layout generation from schematics
- Full custom layout editing with all basic shapes and components
- Design rule checking during layout
- GDSII stream file generation for tapeout to foundries
- Model library with predictive tech files for different process nodes
Chipmachine is targeted at students, hobbyists, and small companies that need an affordable solution for creating custom ICs in small volumes. Its simple and accessible workflow allows even beginners to get started with chip design. While it may lack some advanced features of commercial EDA tools, Chipmachine provides good enough capabilities for many basic IC projects.