Open Source EDA Star KiCad Hits Version 9.0.0, Gains a Wealth of New Features
The latest release of the popular electronic design automation (EDA) tool is now out, and comes with a changelog as long as your arm.
Open source computer-aided design (CAD) and electronic design automation (EDA) project KiCad has announced the release of KiCad 9.0.0 — bringing with it support for "jobsets," file embedding functionality for fully self-contained project files, a new Bezier curve tool, multi-channel design support, and more.
"Version 9 is packed with new features, improvements, and hundreds of bug fixes," the KiCad team writes of the new release. "Our thanks go out to everyone who contributed to KiCad this past year. Whether your contribution was large or small, writing code, submitting bug reports, improving our libraries and documentation, or just supporting us financially: your help made a difference. In accordance with the KiCad stable release policy, version 8 of KiCad will no longer be actively maintained, and we will release bug fix versions of KiCad 9.x over the next year as we develop new features for KiCad 10."
The latest KiCad release brings with it a wealth of new features, added alongside bugfixes through an impressive 4,870 unique commits to the project's source repository. These include a contribution from Mark Roszko, which adds "jobsets" support: pre-defined output jobs that provide an easy way to define a multi-step output pipeline, files for which can be easily shared between users.
Easier sharing is also at the heart of a contribution from Seth Hillbrand: file embeddings, which make it possible to integrated dependencies like 3D models or particular fonts directly into a KiCad project — making "self-contained" projects that can be shared without relying on being bundled with external files.
Other new features include the addition of a Bezier curve tool in all editors and new mouse scroll wheel actions by John Beard, support for multi-channel designs from Tomasz Wlostowski, James Jackson's component class feature, which ease setting specific design rules to multiple symbols and footprints, the ability to add and edit tables to schematics, symbols, and footprints plus custom design rules check (DRC) errors, warnings, and exclusions from Jeff Young, and enhancements to the command-line interface (CLI) — including the ability to generate ray-traced 3D images of a design.
A fuller list of new features in KiCad 9.0.0 is available on the KiCad website; KiCad itself can be downloaded from the same site for Windows, macOS, Linux, or as a Docker container,, while the full source code is published to GitLab under the reciprocal GNU General Public License 3.