The New Annual Release Cadence Hits its Stride
Coming only a year after the huge improvements of the 7.0 release, the KiCAD project is back with more major improvements to their free and open source schematic and pcb layout suite. We’ve been thrilled to watch the acceleration of development on the project, and in only a few years the software has gone from a hobbyist-grade tool to a completely competent full featured ECAD package. It may still not compare to Altium’s sheer quantity of tools for managing complexity in extremely large designs (although a determined user can accomplish much of that via the python scripting interface), but we’re increasingly coming to love KiCAD for small to midsized projects where the less bloated workflow can be a huge time saver – we even used KiCAD to design one of the boards shown off on our PCB Layout Services page, as well as the board level 3D renders. The simple spreadsheet backed component characteristics and snappy workflow remind us of all our favorite parts of old ORCAD schematic capture.
New Feature Highlights
See the full announcement thread on the KiCAD Project Website for an extensive list of feature additions and bug fixes – but we’ve gone through and picked out some our favorites that we think are worth checking out first.
New Import Format Support Added
Version 8.0 adds new cross format ECAD importers for EasyEDA, CADSTAR, Solidworks Electrical PCB, Altium symbol and intlibs, EAGLE symbol libraries, and LTSpice schematics.
EAGLE design import was already possible, but would previously pull all of the symbols into design-embedded symbols, which was a pain to extract to a well organized library – and it also wasn’t great at mapping symbol property fields, and handling odd symbol geometries and stacked pins. Version 8 improvements to the EAGLE importer should alleviate many of the issues.
Support for library conversion from Altium intlibs is a huge step forward in KiCAD-Altium cross compatibility, and a welcome addition for people like us who maintain parts libraries in both CAD packages.
And lastly, schematic import directly from LTSpice! What a huge convenience for analog circuit design. Typically one first develops analog subcircuits in LTSpice and works on the development in simulation, then when the design was working and ready for integration into the actual schematics the whole thing had to be re-drafted. It wasn’t the end of the world, but was always a tedious time waster – which can now be completely side-stepped!
Power-Net Symbols Without the Gremlins
One of the most awkward things in KiCAD has always been it’s handling of power net symbols. It’s not a big enough deal to be a real issue, but it was one of those things where when teaching a new engineer the program it was always a little embarrassing to explain how to handle power symbols. In every other ECAD schematic package, one can simply copy a power symbol, say for example “+3V3”, and rename it to “+5V0”, and just like that now you had a symbol for your 5 volt rail, the same way you would manipulate regular net labels.
Until now this was impossible in KiCAD, and power symbols could not be renamed to map to different nets. The process for dealing with this meant manually creating a separate schematic symbol in your symbol libraries for every voltage rail you might ever encounter. It got particularly bad with specialty named rails, for example for an FPGA mezzanine card you might have “+VADJ_FMC”, or a tunable “+VDD_CORE_ZYNQ” rail, etc. After a year or two one had a graveyard of design-specific power rail symbols building up in their library and it was just a real kludge all around. The process of creating the power net symbols was also easy to screw up, because they required special flags to be set differently from typical symbols,
This has been improved in version 8.0, and now works like a new user would expect, consistently with other ECAD packages – where the net symbols can just be renamed on the fly like regular net labels. It’s a small detail, but it’s been begging to be fixed for a few years now, so it’s a great improvement – and we can happily say you’re now free to delete your symbol library of power net labels!
Multi-Element Smart Drag comes to the PCB Layout Editor
The layout editor now supports dynamic dragging of multiple elements at once, retaining track routes and dynamically shifting them along with the moved footprints. This is another big quality of life improvement. It’s common in the early stages of a PCB layout project that you need to scoot a whole subcircuit over, and previously if you had already routed it in you would have to reconnect the all externally connected routing by hand.
Improved Track Length Tuning
Length tuning for differential pairs and skew constrained signal groups is a finicky tool in a lot of layout packages. Even in Altium, which is ostensibly a more powerful CAD package, the length tuning tools are not great. KiCAD and Altium’s tools both had similar issues, where once you did some length adjustment and added serpentine patterning, the patterned section of trace would become an un-editable object that you couldn’t tweak. In practice that means repeatedly using the finicky length adjustment tool, not getting quite the result you wanted, then deleting the tuned segment and just trying again until you got one that came out correctly.
KiCAD’s version 8 update adds massive improvements to the length tuning experience, making the serpentine segments editable after the fact in a similar way to adjusting and shifting regular traces. This makes it much faster to get tuned tracks to hit their length matching constraints, even if the segment generated by the initial tool doesn’t come out perfectly. The new feature will be a significant quality of life improvement for anyone doing boards with a lot matched diff pairs. Wide differential interfaces such as PCIe have always been tedious to do the length matching for – so improvements to these tools are always welcome.
64bit ARM Windows Added to Nightly Build Targets
ARM Windows targets are still pretty niche, but looking forward to later this year when Windows laptops are expected to launch with Qualcomm’s new X-Elite ARM CPUs, it’s nice to see CAD packages starting to roll out expanded support for ARM builds. If Qualcomm’s SoCs can hit similar performance levels to Apple’s M3 series, these new Windows laptops will make great portable CAD machines.
Additional details on the state of nightly ARM64 Windows binaries can be found in the post-v7 new features development thread.
Expanding KiCAD Services Offerings
As KiCAD has continued to improve we’ve seen more and more companies adopting it in industry over the more costly commercial alternates, and have been expanding our design capacity to support KiCAD projects. Our electronics design team offers full schematic capture and electronics design support in KiCAD (as well as Altium and other toolchains), we’ve added capacity to support additional KiCAD PCB layout projects, and we also offer specialty services in library and design conversion to and from KiCAD’s open file formats from proprietary tools such as Altium, EAGLE, and ORCAD, to support migrating design assets between toolsets.