Part 7—Discussion: Interchange Formats between Printed Circuit Board Layout Programs

One recurring issue for electrical engineers is that it is difficult to share board designs between programs (such as Altium*, ORCAD*, KiCAD*, and Eagle*). At the moment, sharing designs is often constrained by the design tool used. The majority of people in the OSH communities use Eagle files because this is an established norm. At Intel, we use commercial layout programs with a high license fee and a proprietary format.