tuxmaniac’s blog

For all those VLSI enthusiasts, Magic is now debianised. For people who are still wondering what “Magic” is all about here it goes..

Magic is a venerable VLSI layout tool, written in the 1980’s at Berkeley by John Ousterhout, now famous primarily for writing the scripting interpreter language Tcl. Due largely in part to its liberal Berkeley open-source license, magic has remained popular with universities and small companies. The open-source license has allowed VLSI engineers with a bent toward programming to implement clever ideas and help magic stay abreast of fabrication technology. However, it is the well thought-out core algorithms which lend to magic the greatest part of its popularity. Magic is widely cited as being the easiest tool to use for circuit layout, even for people who ultimately rely on commercial tools for their product design flow.

For folks on Ubuntu Hardy Heron add the following lines to your sources.list, do a sudo apt-get update and then install as you would do any other application

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/aanjhan/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/aanjhan/ubuntu hardy main

For people on other Debian based distros you can directly download the .deb from the below link.

http://tuxmaniac.com/work/packages/magic/magic_7.5.129-1_i386.deb 

The package has been uploaded into Debian Mentors for review and a few review comments have already been closed. But one major hurdle for this package to enter Debian is a licensing issue. One can read the entire thread on magic-dev here and I would be more than happy to accept suggestions as to how I can get this issue resolved.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 12:28 am and is filed under FLOSS, electronics, ubuntu, debian. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.