[Magic-dev] learning about Magic and VLSI

[R. Timothy Edwards]

Dear Ryan,

> I work with online courses and distributed education at Arizona State 
> University’s Fulton School of Engineering.

I am currently the primary developer of "magic", so I suppose I'm best
qualified to reply to your query.

> I’d recently heard of “Magic” as a tool for VLSI, which is an area of 
> study.  I was wondering if you could tell me more about Magic, and if 
> you think it would be available to ASU for use in our programs.

Yes.  "magic" has been used in universities worldwide since the 1980's,
when it was first written by John Ousterhout at UC Berkeley.  Since
about 3 years ago, I have worked on further development to make the
program competitive with the expensive industry standard tools like
Cadence and Mentor Graphics.  However, "magic" is, and always has been,
freely distributed open source software.  It's primary drawback at
present is the lack of support for the tools by chip foundries.  Only
the MOSIS foundation at USC has any official support for it, largely
due to the anti-open-source sentiment among foundries and commercial
tool vendors which prevents users and distributers of magic and other
open-source VLSI tools from distributing information that foundries
perceive to be proprietary.

At MultiGiG, I have managed to work out an environment in which
magic, xcircuit, and pcb (our primary open-source tools) complement
our limited number of licenses for commercial tools.  Although our
design flow is largely proprietary, I hope to be generating an
open-source version of the tool flow and adding it to the tool
distribution.

The most detailed information on the program can be found on my
website at
		http://opencircuitdesign.com/magic/

If you have any further questions, feel free to contact me by either
email or by phone (contact information below).

					Regards,
					Tim

+--------------------------------+-------------------------------------+
| Dr. R. Timothy Edwards (Tim)   | email: tim.edwards at multigig.com     |
| MultiGiG, Inc.                 | web:   http://www.multigig.com      |
| 100 Enterprise Way, Suite A-3  | phone: (831) 621-3283               |
| Scotts Valley, CA 95066        | cell:  (240) 401-0616               |
+--------------------------------+-------------------------------------+