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So happy there is a Liberated CAD project!

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demis

So happy there is a Liberated CAD project!

Hello, introducing myself:
I am in the semiconductor/microchip industry, and have always been stuck with expensive CAD softwares for designing microchips - I am really happy there's a project to Liberate us from this expensive proprietary software!
I have been using AutoCAD 2004 LT (our small company can't afford to keep buying new versions, so we're stuck with that old one), and previously used L-Edit, KLayout, CleWin and a have made a few programattically-layed out designs with custom MatLab & c-libraries.

I would love it if LibreCAD met my needs, as then hopefully all microchip designers would have access to a free tool for creating their designs. Mask design (as we call it) is very simple compared so some of what other users will be doing with their CAD software, but in other respects has some needs that are rarely met with standard non-microchip-based CAD software.

For example, our masks are entirely 2-D (even though we eventually create a 3-D structure), so no 3-D needed.
However, it's critical that we are able to quickly see how various layers align on top of each other, while differentiating layers - so "hatching" is extremely important. However, applying a "hatch" to each layer is tedious, and mask design software always auto-fills every shape with the layer's defined pattern automatically. This feature is pretty rare in CAD software (automatically filling/patterning all objects on a layer, even as you create new objects) - I wonder if someone could make a plugin to do that? (I would probably just make a mess of things if I were to try myself - it sounds pretty complicated, but I'd be willing to try.)
Also, boolean operations on 2-D objects is a must.

I'm looking forward to trying this out, and perhaps helping to make it better!

R. van Twisk

Re: So happy there is a Liberated CAD project!

Administrator

Hey,

I am thinking out loud here, does it help you have you can apply some transparency on each layer?

(Looking at your other post) At this moment LibreCAD doesn’t support boolean operations of poly lines,

these sort of things we have been thinking/talking about but isn’t very high on our priority list, we simply don’t get

that request to often.. The same goes for a tool like boundary.

On the bright side, we are working on LibreCAD through GSoC which is currently beeing created/designed on and

will support scripting trough Lua. But don’t get your hopes up, we are in a very very eurly stage yet. Nothing

is really working and it’s build up from the ground.

If you have a minute, please put on our bugracker your future requests : http://sourceforge.net/p/librecad/feature-requests/

This help’s us to understand the needs of our users. In the forum it might/will/can be forgotten very easily.

Cheers,

Ries

On May 26, 2014, at 6:57 PM, demis [via LibreCAD] <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hello, introducing myself:
I am in the semiconductor/microchip industry, and have always been stuck with expensive CAD softwares for designing microchips - I am really happy there's a project to Liberate us from this expensive proprietary software!
I have been using AutoCAD 2004 LT (our small company can't afford to keep buying new versions, so we're stuck with that old one), and previously used L-Edit, KLayout, CleWin and a have made a few programattically-layed out designs with custom MatLab & c-libraries.

I would love it if LibreCAD met my needs, as then hopefully all microchip designers would have access to a free tool for creating their designs. Mask design (as we call it) is very simple compared so some of what other users will be doing with their CAD software, but in other respects has some needs that are rarely met with standard non-microchip-based CAD software.

For example, our masks are entirely 2-D (even though we eventually create a 3-D structure), so no 3-D needed.
However, it's critical that we are able to quickly see how various layers align on top of each other, while differentiating layers - so "hatching" is extremely important. However, applying a "hatch" to each layer is tedious, and mask design software always auto-fills every shape with the layer's defined pattern automatically. This feature is pretty rare in CAD software (automatically filling/patterning all objects on a layer, even as you create new objects) - I wonder if someone could make a plugin to do that? (I would probably just make a mess of things if I were to try myself - it sounds pretty complicated, but I'd be willing to try.)
Also, boolean operations on 2-D objects is a must.

I'm looking forward to trying this out, and perhaps helping to make it better!

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