Schematic editor

A Schematic editor is a tool for schematic capture of electrical circuits or electronic circuits.

Schematic editors replaced manual drawing of schematic diagrams, but they still retain the capability of outputting schematics on specially formatted sheets. At the same time modern schematic editors capture schematic data in a way suited for automatic processing by further stages of the design cycle.

Besides basic drawing and visualization capabilities, modern schematic editors typically provide the following:

• The ability to capture electrical properties and other attributes of components, wires, nets and pins.
• Hierarchical way of design.
• Abilities to generate netlists and other common representations of the designed circuit from schematic.
• The ability to generate documentation.
• Libraries of standard components.
• The ability to automatically detect and report errors in the schematic.
• the abilities to input designs from various formats, such as VHDL, Verilog, EDIF.

Availability

There are many schematic editors available, including commercial, freeware, shareware, and open source applications. ^[1]

1. ^ http://www.olimex.com/pcb/dtools.html [reference list of software titles]