KiCad Joins Linux Foundation to Advance Electronic Design Automation

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced that it will host KiCad, a free, open source software suite for Electronic Design Automation (EDA). The program facilitates the design of schematics for electronic circuits and their conversion to Printed Circuit Board (PCB) designs. Under the Linux Foundation, KiCad will expand its community and ensure long-term sustainability. 

"KiCad is a set of applications used by engineers focused on board design," said Michael Dolan, VP of Strategic Programs at the Linux Foundation. "It's a professional and free piece of software that gives engineers the freedom to use the software anywhere and across any platform, not tying them to specific hardware architectures. Its progress in creating an integrated environment for schematic capture and PCB layout design has been massive and the Linux Foundation's infrastructure and governance model will give it the required support to sustain that growth for the long term." 

"We've seen the program skyrocket in use over recent years, with some board vendors reporting more than 15 percent of new board orders designed using KiCad," said Wayne Stambaugh, KiCad Project Lead. "To accommodate this rate of growth there was a need to re-evaluate our revenue support model to help us attract more people to the project. Under the Linux Foundation we will have increased flexibility to spend donations to help move the project forward as well as an increased exposure to potential new donors."

This project is also participating in the CommunityBridge platform, created earlier this year by the Linux Foundation to empower open source developers – and the individuals and organizations who support them – to advance sustainability, security, and diversity in open source technology.

KiCad was launched in 1992 and today has corporate, community, and individual donors including Digi- Key, System76, AISLER and NextPCB, with many donating through CERN. The main tools that exist within the package are used to create schematics, printed circuit board layouts, spice simulations, bill of materials, artwork, Gerber files, and 3D views of the PCB and its components. KiCad is a cross platform tool, running on Windows, Linux, and Apple MacOS and is released under the open source GNU GPL.

For more information please visit http://www.kicad-pcb.org/ or KiCad blog, Facebook or Twitter pages.

About The Linux Foundation 
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world's leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation's projects are critical to the world's infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation's methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

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