in any project. There are also tools to help with importing components from other EDA applications, for instance EAGLE. There are also third party libraries available for KiCad, including SnapEDA, and the Digi-Key KiCad Library. Configuration files are in well documented plain text, which helps with interfacing version control systems, as well as with automated component generation scripts. Languages Multiple languages are supported, such as Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, and Swedish. Schematic editing The KiCad schematic editor has features including hierarchical schematic sheets, custom symbol creation, electrical rules check (ERC) and integrated ngspice circuit simulation. Schematic symbols are very loosely coupled to circuit board footprints to encourage reuse of footprints and symbols (e.g. a single 0805 footprint can be used for capacitors, resistors, inductors, etc). PCB editing Internally KiCad's PCB editor supports up to 32 copper layers and 32 technical layers. Dimensions are stored with nanometer precision in signed 32-bit integers making the theoretical maximum PCB dimension 231 nm, or approximately 2.14 meters. There are a variety of tools available while doing layout through both built in functions and external plugins. Some advanced built in functionality includes a push and shove router, differential and single ended trace length tuning, net hilighting and individual layer dimming, and a highly customizable design rule checking (DRC). A number of external tools have been developed following the addition of python scripting integration in to KiCad. A number of plugins exist such as a high quality silkscreen label generators, BOM and assembly viewers, panelization plugins, along with many other plugins. A 3D PCB viewing function is based on STEP and VRML models, and the board model can be exported for CAD integration. Community On 12 March 2015 Olimex Ltd, a provider of development tools and embedded device programmers, announced that they have switched from EAGLE to KiCad as their primary EDA tool. See also Comparison of EDA software List of free and open source software packages List of free electronics circuit simulators References External links Official documentation Getting started in KiCad Official KiCad libraries group 1992 software Electronic design automation software Electronic design automation software for Linux Free electronic design automation software Free software programmed in C++ Software that uses wxWidgets