Electronics Design (EDA)

Electronics design covers the route from schematic to manufacturing files: drawing the circuit, assigning components, laying out the board, routing, design rule checks and Gerber output.

The important point in this category is that the leading open tool has no limit on board area or layer count — unlike the free editions of commercial packages, where exactly that restriction is what pushes you to buy. That is why it became the default in open hardware and academic projects.

Alongside it are tools that are friendlier for beginners and for project documentation, and tools for digital design — logic circuit simulation and hardware description languages.