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Electric (software)

circuit-design system

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 18, 2026
Entity authorityQ1970665
Source-derived summary

The Electric VLSI Design System is an EDA tool written in the early 1980s by Steven M. Rubin. Electric is used to construct logic wire schematics and to perform analysis of integrated circuit layout.

It can also handle hardware description languages such as VHDL and Verilog. The system has many analysis and synthesis tools, including design rule checking, simulation, routing, Layout vs. Schematic, logical effort, and more.

Electric is written in Java, and was released as part of the GNU project in 1998 under the GNU General Public License.

In 2017, Electric development ceased, but support and bug fixes continue.

Alternative design style for integrated circuits

Unlike other systems that design integrated circuits (ICs) by manipulating polygons on different layers of the wafer, Electric views IC layout as connected circuitry, similar to the way schematic capture systems work. In Electric, designers place nodes (transistors, contacts, etc.) and connect them with arcs (wires). This has advantages and disadvantages.

Editorial summary

“Electric (software)” enters the record as circuit-design system. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Electric, software and circuit-design can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1998, 2017—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1982. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Electric, software and circuit-design.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Electric (software)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Electric, software and circuit-design provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1970665. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1998 and 2017.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
Verify next

The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Electric (software)”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Electric (software) primary sources, Electric (software) archive and Electric research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Electric (software)”?
  2. What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
  3. Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Electric (software)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.