Yale has an academic license to various Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools, used for academic and research purposes.
This page provides general information on the tools and a jumping off point to additional information. The page is on a Wiki so that the content can be collaboratively maintained. Please feel free to update and edit, or to put question or notes inline for later corrections. Yale does not have anyone dedicated or responsible for the EDA tools, so various professors, teaching fellows, and graduate students will from time to time make changes to the installation, libraries, or configurations.
The Electrical Engineering Department has purchased licenses to these tools but it is OK for users in other parts of Yale to use them. For example, a physicist could conceivably be interested in using these tools to design a new chip for some sort of detection, measurement, or computation.
The tools that are installed are from:
Cadence
The cadence license includes very advanced chip design tools, as well as the ORCAD suite of tools.
The advanced tools that we have installed are a subset of what Cadence makes available under the academic license. The tools that we have installed are for layout and simulation mostly.
The software is installed on the Jove cluster. So one way of using the software is to log in to one of the Jove machines, either directly (they are in the Mann Student Center) or remotely (via an ssh, tunneling the X-Windows).
The ORCAD software is designed to run on Windows PCs. So the software should be obtained and installed on the PCs directly. This software is used in some of the introductory electrical engineering course labs.
The EE department maintains a license server. So when you start the tools, the software is configured to contact the license server to determine if the proper number of users are logged in. The license we have from Cadence is very generous (10's of users) so we rarely if ever reach that limit. Also, it is inexpensive to obtain more licenses.
Synopsys
We also have a license to Synopsys tools. A subset of what is available is (I think) installed on the Jove cluster, or it can be installed on user machines.
Libraries
This is a placeholder for information on libraries that we have installed on Jove.