# XSCHEM PRESENTATION

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## XSCHEM IS

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- A Free OSS small project, follows the UNIX KISS philosophy. ~30K SLOC.
- A Digital / Analog / Mixed mode circuit schematic editor.
- A hierarchical design tool: wrap (parametric) sub-blocks into symbols and use them multiple times.
- Fast: Performance is important. Editing a schematic with 100K instances MUST not be a problem.
- Xschem knows the connectivity. Netlist build is embedded in the core.
- Verilog, VHDL, Spice, tEDAx netlist backends. Adding another backend is not difficult.
- Intensive and time consuming computations all done in pure C.
- Tcl-tk used for GUI and scripting language. Direct Xlib drawing.
- Netlist extraction must be instant (<500ms) on small to medium designs.

## XSCHEM IS NOT

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- A space-ship. Does not depend on too many libs.
- A Gtk or Qt project, with APIs changing constantly.
- Proprietary or using undocumented file formats.
- A layout tool.
- A circuit simulator.
- A native windows software (yet).
- Super easy to use: there is a learning curve.
- A memory hog: XSCHEM with a medium design loaded requires 54M virtual memory, 24M resident set. Perfectly useable on an Intel-Atom netbook with 1GB RAM. This is my performance test machine.
- A C++, C99, C11 project: all code is ANSI-C C89, works on old Solaris, Irix machines, compiles on 32bit, 64 bit and on armhf.