Logical design flow. Tools like pharosc, Alliance and gds2pov are more such design tools in FEL that not only route and automate the layout generation but also layout the design flow. These provide a complete real-time logic (RTL) for CIF and GDSII formats and create a three-dimensional view of the scenes described in GDSII files. Complete checking of the model and format proofing occurs at this stage.
Experience talks
Students working on Fedora have liked FEL a lot from the time it was just a project. They not only want to contribute towards it as users but also as developers.
A student at http://blog.gmane.org/ says that she has been working on Fedora electronic spin since quite some time now. She has liked working with this so much that she has also worked as an ambassador promoting the advantages of FEL. She herself started using Fedora only with FEL and admires this platform so much that she wants other students to get an opportunity to learn and use it.
Another student in the same blog says that he has heard about FEL, admires it and wants to contribute towards it, being a part of this project.
Even though it has many positive features, you will find designers who are not sure if they want to use FEL, because they have never used Fedora and are not sure if they will be able to partition their existing OS to allocate space for Fedora. But, I think that every new tool has certain challenges in the beginning that can be sorted out further with extended usage, especially when there is free-of-cost community support where you only need to share your problems and the solutions come to you.
A single platform with so many design-and-simulation tools to learn and use, FEL has plenty of advantages for the electronics design and simulation industry. Make sure to try your hands at it.
The author is a technical journalist at EFY
