Introduction to KiCad

KiCad is an open-source software suite for creating electronic circuit schematics, printed circuit boards (PCBs), and associated part descriptions. KiCad supports an integrated design workflow in which a schematic and corresponding PCB are designed together, as well as standalone workflows for special uses. KiCad also includes several utilities to help with circuit and PCB design, including a PCB calculator for determining electrical properties of circuit structures, a Gerber viewer for inspecting manufacturing files, a 3D viewer for visualizing the finished PCB, and an integrated SPICE simulator for inspecting circuit behavior.

KiCad runs on all major operating systems and a wide range of computer hardware. It supports PCBs with up to 32 copper layers and is suitable for creating designs of all complexities. KiCad is developed by a volunteer team of software and electrical engineers around the world with a mission of creating free and open-source electronics design software suitable for professional designers.

The latest documentation for KiCad is available at https://docs.kicad.org.

Downloading and installing KiCad

KiCad runs on many operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Apple macOS, and many major Linux distributions.

You can find the most up to date instructions and download links at https://www.kicad.org/download/. These instructions are not included in this manual as they may change over time with the release of operating system updates.

KiCad stable releases occur periodically per the KiCad Stable Release Policy. New features are continually being added to the development branch. If you would like to take advantage of these new features and help out by testing them, please download the latest nightly build package for your platform. Nightly builds may introduce bugs such as file corruption, generation of bad Gerbers, etc., but it is the goal of the KiCad Development Team to keep the development branch as usable as possible during new feature development.

Support

If you have ideas, remarks or questions, or if you just need help: