> My conclusion is that the whole digital circuit design industry is ripe for disruption by open source...

I've seen this claim many times before, but I never see any proposals about exactly how that would happen.

All open source FPGA tools that exist today are good enough for fun hobby projects (I use them every once in a while), but none of them have the additional features that are needed in the real world.

When pressed about it, people point to 50GB downloads, bad GUIs, and bugs in the tooling. Not that these aren't issues, but if that's all you can point to, then I don't see where the disruption will come from? In order to have that many bugs and 50GB of tools download, you need tons of code to begin with, and the functionality that it implements.

Right now, that's not there, and it very likely never will. It's such a niche domain.

One notable exception is Verilator which is growing fast and competes welll with commercial Verilog simulators (https://github.com/verilator/verilator) It has industry support notably Wester Digital.

> My conclusion is that the whole digital circuit design industry is ripe for disruption by open source, and I'm rather surprised it hasn't happened yet.

Just build a modern design rule checking (DRC) engine with parasitic extractor. That's all you have to do. I eagerly await your release on github.

I agree with you that open source really is the only valid path forward. However, you have to convince some very smart people to join your cause and they expect to be paid up front.

Yep, the domain knowledge is too narrow to develop free or open source tools like that. Someone with that knowledge needs to work full time to gain it, thus needs to make a living at it. The few open source tools come from universities were labor is cheap, and suffer from bit rot. I’m specifically thinking of MAGIC.