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About Degate Degate is a multi-platform software for semi-automatic VLSI reverse engineering of digital logic in chips. The current main maintainer of Degate is Dorian Bachelot.

Degate was actively developed by Martin Schobert, during his thesis, from 2008 to 2011. For now, the project is inactive and only get some small fixes since 2011. The project is composed of a library (libGate) and a GUI interface (Degate). Degate has definitely a great potential, mainly because it is the only free and open-source software for hardware reverse engineering of chips, but never knew how to impose itself in the community. One possible reason for that is because Degate was known to be unstable and have impacting bugs in a first place.

This project aims to totally replace the old Degate, with a focus on Windows, Linux and MacOS support, getting better stability and general modernization. To achieve this the aim was to drop GTK and move to Qt and merge the lib and the GUI part of the project. Another objective was to minimize the number of dependencies, for now it uses only Boost and Qt and the mid-term objective is to only keep Qt and remove Boost.

The stability was the main problem of the old Degate and the main reason why the community hadn't already united around it. Regarding that, we want to have fewer bugs as possible, even if some functionality needs to be dropped (for the moment).

For the moment we have (as functionalities):
  • OpenGL 3 support (better performances and evolutive),
  • Qt (bunch of tools, open-source and easy cross-platform),
  • Multi-platform support (official support for Linux, Windows and MacOS),
  • Multi-language support (for now only English and French are implemented),
  • UTF-8 support for the workspace (the main area of the software, where you can work on high-definition chips images),
  • Backward compatibility of old Degate project format,
  • Project configuration (elements color, project name, size…),
  • Layers configuration (type, position, background image…),
  • Gate and gate configuration (gate template, gate instance, behavior with VHDL and Verilog support and debugging),
  • Via and via configuration,
  • EMarker (Electric Marker) and emarker configuration,
  • Interconnection (electric connection between electric objects),
  • Template matching (for gates),
  • Grid,
  • Via matching (can be tricky),
  • Wire matching (need a rework),
  • Sub-projects,
  • Annotation and annotation configuration,
  • Light and dark theme support,
  • Rule checks,
  • Modules,
  • Connection inspector,
  • And much more…
Downloads About downloads Every download on this page is directly from Github (you can see it when hovering a download button). This website is just a convenient way to get them, but in fact it's the same as downloading them directly from the Github releases page.

Each download is created via Github actions, the task is automatic and performed by Github servers. The sources used to create these downloads are those available on Github. Therefore, there is no human intervention when creating them, this prevents any kind of security issue.

For more, please see the downloads security notice. Close {{ download_cat_key }}: {{ download_cat['version'] }} {{ platform['icon'] }} {{ platform_key }} {{ config['types'][download['type']]['icon'] }} {{ config['types'][download['type']]['name'] }} {{ config['types'][download['type']]['info'] }}

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fa-github Github fa-bug Bug tracker mdi-chat Chat with us ! mdi-book Documentation mdi-layers Demo projects mdi-web Website sources This website was made by Dorian Bachelot and Korantin Bordeau--Aubert. Degate is under GNU General Public License v3.0 license.