Magic VLSI Layout Editor

Overview

Magic VLSI is a powerful free and open-source electronic design automation layout tool for Very Large Scale Integration design of integrated circuits. Magic has been keeping pace with the industry since its initial software release in the 1980s, with very frequent new releases still ongoing after more than 40 years.

Magic VLSI is easy to use and easy to expand for specialized tasks. Besides being a popular choice for universities, commercial projects, and open source and community ASIC design, it is also often considered a "must-have" in the Efabless ecosystem and is an incredibly feature-rich way to leverage the sky130 Open PDK.

Features

• Real-time design rule checker (DRC) that requires little overhead.
• Supports comprehensive Tcl scripting.
• Supports parametric cells, and importing parametric/hierarchical circuits and circuit data from SPICE files.
• Native text-format ".mag" file type.
• Support for .gds (GDSII) reading and writing.
• Natively supported by the sky130 Open PDK, and also supports other open and commercial PDKs through "tech files".
• Provides layout extraction to SPICE, including parasitics, for simulation

Magic VLSI Documentation

• Official Magic VLSI documentation (including tutorials and reference manuals, on opencircuitdesign.com)
• More general information at opencircuitdesign.com

Magic VLSI Download and Compilation

Various distributions of the Magic VLSI source code and pre-compiled packages can be found on the Magic VLSI download page.

The most common way to install an up-to-date version of Magic is to use Ubuntu Linux and obtain its latest source code from its GitHub repository (https://github.com/RTimothyEdwards/magic) and build it:

git clone https://github.com/RTimothyEdwards/magic magic-src
cd magic-src
./configure
make
sudo make install
magic --version
# 8.3.xxx

There are also instructions specific to macOS.