Getting started with open source IC design or "VLSI" tools

Integrated circuit design is a diverse field from designing of small sensors to complex SOC architecture. There are various tools vendors like Candace and Synopsis who provide software to design them. These are licenced tools and need a large investment in buying them is there any alternatives to them, yes there are! Electric VLSI design tool is one of the alternative it is completely open source and can be downloaded and used by anyone irrespective of the operating systems. But there are limitations as one of the readers of the article pointed out "These freewares are no where close to what professional tools are capable of doing. We cannot possibly design a very simple low power analog circuit with these tools in deep sub-micron technology nodes and expect it to work like we expect." So these freeware cannot be used as an alternative but can be used as a experimental and educational tool to get familiarized with the IC design.

So are this tutorial is meant to be a getting started with the electric IC design tool.

It is freely available from the following website: https://www.staticfreesoft.com/products.html and it is a jar file thus you will need to install the latest java SDK to run it.

So I have written a article in my website on my website to design a potential divider using electric.

https://www.integratedcircuitdesign.com/electric/tutorial1.html

This tutorial must be straight forward so do give it a try!

So let me know on any comments or suggestions in improving the content. Happy to hear your feedback :)