There’s a guy working away in Bangalore today who would like to change your ideas about what you pay for EDA tools. His name is Kanai Ghosh and his tool suite is called edautils, as in EDA Utilities. I spoke with Kanai on Skype recently about his efforts.

He told me that after a number of years working in EDA and CAD tool development, he decided to design his own suite of tools. Now several years into that process, working nights and weekends in and around his day job, Kanai’s tools are available for free download on his website.

Per Kanai, edautils pays particular attention to problems associated with integrating IP into larger SoC projects – a critical problem, he says, because today’s design projects can include more than 250 pieces of IP. In addition, today’s SoC has “multiple power and voltage domains” which the designer has to deal with by changing the design on the fly as the design constraints evolve, the designer constantly making “tradeoffs between power/performance/area and the project budget.”

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