Argh, free/low-cost tools. What a disaster.

Eagle pretty much sucks, as it's completely non-intuitive and the library concept is awful. OK, so it runs on OS X, which is a bonus, but not enough of a bonus to make the tool not suck.

The gEDA tools won't even build on OS X due to one of its dependencies not being supported on that platform due to the maintainer's obstinance. Prebuilt binaries are always a few releases behind. Oh, and the developers really aren't interested in user comments. Things like, "You know, all commercial layout tools show the netname in the pads, and some even show it in the traces if you zoom in enough" are met with either, "huh? we didn't know that?" or worse, "Why would you want that." So gEDA is right out. Plus its schematic capture isn't any good.

In the HDL world, there's no good low-cost HDL simulator other than the free ModelSim.

Green Mountain's DirectVHDL is now $49 (down from $189), but they don't support configurations and libraries other than the standards. It's listed as an interpreter, which means the performance, especially for a large design, will be painful. Their web site doesn't indicate support for back-annotated timing simulation using SDF files. But maybe if enough people sprung for the $49, it would encourage them to improve the tool. I just might do this.

gHDL is way behind on standards support and doesn't build on OS X.

I know there's a free Verilog simulator -- Icarus -- but I don't use Verilog unless forced to do so.

Obviously for FPGA place-and-route you are stuck with the vendor tools.

At least SDCC works :)

-a

(Oh yeah, the reason I harp on OS X support: it's Unix underneath the nice GUI, and it also has an good X Window set-up for apps that use X. Support for OS X should be simple and obvious -- yes, Xilinx, I'm talking about YOU -- and arguments about "the platform only accounts for less than x% of the installed base" are silly. I'll bet there are more OS X machines out there than any particular Linux distro.)