Electric (software)

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Electric is an Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tool designed to help engineers create and analyze integrated circuits. It was created in the early 1980s by Steven M. Rubin and can work with hardware description languages like VHDL and Verilog.

Instead of drawing polygons on multiple layers, Electric uses a nodes-and-arcs approach: you place components (transistors, contacts, etc.) as nodes and connect them with wires (arcs). This makes the circuit’s topology clear and helps certain analyses (like layout versus schematic, and simulations) stay in sync. It also makes it possible to attach layout constraints to wires. The trade-off is that some designers find this unfamiliar and harder to learn, and importing polygons from other tools can be tricky.

Electric includes many tools for design and analysis, such as design rule checking, routing, layout versus schematic, simulation, and logical effort. It’s cross-platform and was originally written in C; from version 7 onward it used Java (with Scala in later versions). It is licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later and was released as part of GNU in 1998.

Active development slowed after 2017, but fixes and support continue. The latest stable release is 9.08 (April 17, 2025).

Brief history: Electric was freely distributed to universities in the 1980s and sold as Bravo3VLSI by Applicon. Electric Editor Incorporated formed in 1988 to market it. In 1999 Sun Microsystems helped drive development, and a Java-based version arrived by 2005.