KiCad ( ) is a

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

suite for

electronic design automation Electronic design automation (EDA), also referred to as electronic computer-aided design (ECAD), is a category of software tools for designing Electronics, electronic systems such as integrated circuits and printed circuit boards. The tools wo ...

(EDA). It facilitates the design and simulation of electronic hardware for PCB manufacturing. It features an integrated environment for

schematic capture Schematic capture or schematic entry is a step in the design cycle of electronic design automation (EDA) at which the electronic diagram, or electronic schematic of the designed electronic circuit, is created by a designer. This is done interac ...

, PCB layout, manufacturing file viewing, ngspice-provided SPICE simulation, and engineering calculation. Tools exist within the package to create

bill of materials A bill of materials or product structure (sometimes bill of material, BOM or associated list) is a list of the raw materials, sub-assemblies, intermediate assemblies, sub-components, parts, and the quantities of each needed to manufacture an Prod ...

, artwork, Gerber files, and 3D models of the PCB and its components.

History

Early history

KiCad was created in 1992 by Jean-Pierre Charras while working at IUT de Grenoble. The name came from the first letters in the name of a company of Jean-Pierre's friend in combination with the term CAD. KiCad originally was a collection of electronics programs intended to be used in conjunction with each other. The main tools were EESchema, PCBnew, a Gerber viewer, and a calculator.

2010s to present

With the price of professionally made printed circuit boards rapidly dropping, hobbyist electronic design became much more popular. As a result, KiCad started gaining significant traction and a larger developer base. In 2013 the

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in Meyrin, western suburb of Gene ...

BE-CO-HT section started contributing resources towards KiCad to help foster open hardware development by helping improve KiCad to be on par with commercial EDA tools. From 2013 until approximately 2018 CERN provided two developers part time to help improve KiCad. Much of the work provided by CERN involved massive refactoring of the code base to give KiCad a better structure to grow and adapt. Help is also provided by organizing donations and fundraisers to help pay for additional contract developers for KiCad, along with sponsoring KiCad's web infrastructure. Well over 1400 hours of developer time has been provided by CERN. A major milestone was hit in December 2015 starting with KiCad 4.0.0, the first KiCad release adopting a point release versioning scheme. This was also the first release featuring the more advanced tools implemented by CERN developers. KiCad joined the

Linux Foundation The Linux Foundation (LF) is a non-profit organization established in 2000 to support Linux development and open-source software projects. Background The Linux Foundation started as Open Source Development Labs in 2000 to standardize and prom ...

in November 2019. Additionally two lead developers formed a services corporation in 2019 to help provide additional paid development support for KiCad.

Features

KiCad uses an integrated environment for all of the stages of the design process: Schematic capture, PCB layout, Gerber file generation/visualization, and library editing. KiCad is a

cross-platform Within computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several Computing platform, computing platforms. Some ...

program, written in C++ with

wxWidgets wxWidgets (formerly wxWindows) is a widget toolkit and tools library for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for cross-platform applications. wxWidgets enables a program's GUI code to compile and run on several computer platforms with no s ...

to run on

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free-software Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD, one of the first fully functional and free Unix clones on affordable ...

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

and . Many component libraries are available, and users can add custom components. The custom components can be available on a per-project basis or installed for use in any project. There are also tools to help with importing components from other EDA applications, for instance

EAGLE Eagle is the common name for the golden eagle, bald eagle, and other birds of prey in the family of the Accipitridae. Eagles belong to several groups of Genus, genera, some of which are closely related. True eagles comprise the genus ''Aquila ( ...

and

Altium Altium Limited is an American multinational software company that provides electronic design automation software to engineers who design printed circuit boards. Founded as Protel Systems Pty Ltd in Australia in 1985, the company has regional he ...

. There are also third party libraries available for KiCad, including SnapEDA, and the Digi-Key KiCad Library. Since KiCad V4 the board file is written as

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a character encoding standard used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit''. Almost every webpage is transmitted as UTF-8. UTF-8 supports all 1,112,0 ...

-based human-readable

S-expression In computer programming, an S-expression (or symbolic expression, abbreviated as sexpr or sexp) is an expression in a like-named notation for nested List (computing), list (Tree (data structure), tree-structured) data. S-expressions were invented ...

. The schematics, libraries and project files were also converted to the S-expression format in KiCad V6 for easier maintenance. Configuration files are in well documented plain text as well, which helps with interfacing version control systems, as well as with automated component generation scripts.

Languages

Multiple languages are supported, such as Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, and Swedish.

Schematic editing

The KiCad schematic editor has features including hierarchical schematic sheets, custom symbol creation, electrical rules check ( ERC) and integrated ngspice circuit simulation. Schematic symbols are very loosely coupled to circuit board footprints to encourage reuse of footprints and symbols (e.g. a single 0805 footprint can be used for capacitors, resistors, inductors, etc).

PCB editing

Internally KiCad's PCB editor supports up to 32 copper layers and 32 technical layers. Dimensions are stored with nanometer precision in signed 32-bit integers making the theoretical maximum PCB dimension 2³¹ nm, or approximately 2.14 meters. There are a variety of tools available while doing layout through both built in functions and external plugins. Some advanced built in functionality includes a push and shove router, differential and single ended trace length tuning, net highlighting and individual layer dimming, and a highly customizable design rule checking (DRC). A number of external tools have been developed following the addition of Python scripting integration in to KiCad. A number of plugins exist such as a high quality silkscreen label generators, BOM and assembly viewers, panelization plugins, along with many other plugins. A 3D PCB viewing function is based on STEP and VRML models, and the board model can be exported for CAD integration.

External autorouters

Alternatively, Alfons Wirtz's open-source

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

-based FreeRouting can be used to externally autoroute boards. Anthony Blake's Toporouter, a topological autorouter developed in 2008 for gEDA PCB as a Google-funded open source project mentored by DJ Delorie, has been adapted for use with KiCad as well.

Community

On 12 March 2015 Olimex Ltd, a provider of development tools and embedded device programmers, announced that they have switched from

to KiCad as their primary EDA tool.

References

External links

*
Official documentation

Getting started in KiCad

Official KiCad libraries group

New Feature Development - Kicad Forum
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kicad 1992 software CERN software Electronic design automation software Electronic design automation software for Linux Free electronic design automation software Free software programmed in C++ Software that uses wxWidgets