Eagle (program)
Encyclopedia
EAGLE by Cadsoft is a flexible and expandable EDA
Electronic design automation
Electronic design automation is a category of software tools for designing electronic systems such as printed circuit boards and integrated circuits...

 schematic capture, PCB layout, autorouter and CAM program widely used since 1988.

Schematic capture

EAGLE contains a schematic editor
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...

, for designing circuit diagram
Circuit diagram
A circuit diagram is a simplified conventional graphical representation of an electrical circuit...

s. Parts can be placed on many sheets and connected together through ports.

PCB layout

The PCB
Printed circuit board
A printed circuit board, or PCB, is used to mechanically support and electrically connect electronic components using conductive pathways, tracks or signal traces etched from copper sheets laminated onto a non-conductive substrate. It is also referred to as printed wiring board or etched wiring...

 layout editor allows back annotation to the schematic and auto-routing to automatically connect traces based on the connections defined in the schematic.

EAGLE saves Gerber
Gerber File
The Gerber format is a file format used by printed circuit board industry software to describe the images of a printed circuit board . The Gerber format is the de-facto industry standard for printed circuit board image transfer.There are two versions. RS-274X is the most commonly used today...

 and PostScript
PostScript
PostScript is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. It is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. Adobe PostScript 3 is also the worldwide printing and imaging...

 layout files and Excellon
Excellon file
- Definition :The Excellon format is a format used to drive CNC drilling and routing machines in electronics manufacturing of printed circuit boards . It is a variant of the EIA RS-274-C standard....

 and Sieb & Meyer drill files. These standard files are accepted by many PCB fabrication companies.

Third-party libraries

Of particular note is the popular DIY electronics parts store Sparkfun Electronics that has grown up largely due to the hobbyist market exemplified by Make Magazine
Make (magazine)
Make is an American quarterly magazine published by O'Reilly Media which focuses on do it yourself and/or DIWO projects involving computers, electronics, robotics, metalworking, woodworking and other disciplines...

and others. Many of these companies offer EAGLE part libraries which define schematic shapes, pinouts, and part sizes to allow for correct layout in the PCB layout editor.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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