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KiCad
KiCad (/ˈkiːˌkæd/ KEE-kad) is a free software suite for electronic design automation (EDA). It facilitates the design and simulation of electronic hardware for PCB manufacturing. It features an integrated environment for schematic capture, PCB layout, manufacturing file viewing, ngspice-provided SPICE simulation, and engineering calculation. Tools exist within the package to create bill of materials, artwork, Gerber files, and 3D models of the PCB and its components.
KiCad was created in 1992 by Jean-Pierre Charras while working at IUT de Grenoble. The name came from the first letters in the name of a company of Jean-Pierre's friend in combination with the term CAD. KiCad originally was a collection of electronics programs intended to be used in conjunction with each other. The main tools were EESchema, PCBnew, a Gerber viewer, and a calculator.
With the price of professionally made printed circuit boards rapidly dropping, hobbyist electronic design became much more popular. As a result, KiCad started gaining significant traction and a larger developer base.
In 2013 the CERN BE-CO-HT section started contributing resources towards KiCad to help foster open hardware development by helping improve KiCad to be on par with commercial EDA tools. From 2013 until approximately 2018 CERN provided two developers part time to help improve KiCad. Much of the work provided by CERN involved massive refactoring of the code base to give KiCad a better structure to grow and adapt. Help is also provided by organizing donations and fundraisers to help pay for additional contract developers for KiCad, along with sponsoring KiCad's web infrastructure. Well over 1400 hours of developer time has been provided by CERN.
A major milestone was hit in December 2015 starting with KiCad 4.0.0, the first KiCad release adopting a point release versioning scheme. This was also the first release featuring the more advanced tools implemented by CERN developers.
KiCad joined the Linux Foundation in November 2019.
Additionally two lead developers formed a services corporation in 2019 to help provide additional paid development support for KiCad.
In June of 2025, the KiCad team advised users to use X11-based Linux desktop environments and avoid any version of Linux that uses Wayland, stating "These problems exist because Wayland’s design omits basic functionality that desktop applications for X11, Windows and macOS have relied on for decades—things like being able to position windows or warp the mouse cursor. This functionality was omitted by design, not oversight."
Hub AI
KiCad AI simulator
(@KiCad_simulator)
KiCad
KiCad (/ˈkiːˌkæd/ KEE-kad) is a free software suite for electronic design automation (EDA). It facilitates the design and simulation of electronic hardware for PCB manufacturing. It features an integrated environment for schematic capture, PCB layout, manufacturing file viewing, ngspice-provided SPICE simulation, and engineering calculation. Tools exist within the package to create bill of materials, artwork, Gerber files, and 3D models of the PCB and its components.
KiCad was created in 1992 by Jean-Pierre Charras while working at IUT de Grenoble. The name came from the first letters in the name of a company of Jean-Pierre's friend in combination with the term CAD. KiCad originally was a collection of electronics programs intended to be used in conjunction with each other. The main tools were EESchema, PCBnew, a Gerber viewer, and a calculator.
With the price of professionally made printed circuit boards rapidly dropping, hobbyist electronic design became much more popular. As a result, KiCad started gaining significant traction and a larger developer base.
In 2013 the CERN BE-CO-HT section started contributing resources towards KiCad to help foster open hardware development by helping improve KiCad to be on par with commercial EDA tools. From 2013 until approximately 2018 CERN provided two developers part time to help improve KiCad. Much of the work provided by CERN involved massive refactoring of the code base to give KiCad a better structure to grow and adapt. Help is also provided by organizing donations and fundraisers to help pay for additional contract developers for KiCad, along with sponsoring KiCad's web infrastructure. Well over 1400 hours of developer time has been provided by CERN.
A major milestone was hit in December 2015 starting with KiCad 4.0.0, the first KiCad release adopting a point release versioning scheme. This was also the first release featuring the more advanced tools implemented by CERN developers.
KiCad joined the Linux Foundation in November 2019.
Additionally two lead developers formed a services corporation in 2019 to help provide additional paid development support for KiCad.
In June of 2025, the KiCad team advised users to use X11-based Linux desktop environments and avoid any version of Linux that uses Wayland, stating "These problems exist because Wayland’s design omits basic functionality that desktop applications for X11, Windows and macOS have relied on for decades—things like being able to position windows or warp the mouse cursor. This functionality was omitted by design, not oversight."