EDIF

EDIF, short for Electronic Design Interchange Format, is a family of text-based, machine-readable languages used to describe electronic designs. It was designed to facilitate the exchange of design data between electronic design automation (EDA) tools, including netlists, circuit hierarchies, device models, and related metadata.

The format emerged in the late 1980s and was developed by industry consortia such as the EDIF Forum to provide a vendor-neutral interchange standard. Over the years it evolved through multiple revisions, enabling the representation of libraries, cells, views, instances, nets, and attributes. EDIF can describe both schematic-level netlists and more abstract representations used by HDL and logic synthesis tools.

A typical EDIF description organizes data into libraries containing cells, which in turn contain views that define the design's structure, connections, and associated models. The language supports hierarchy, arrays, replication constructs, and metadata attributes, allowing tools to interchange not only connectivity but also device characteristics and timing or electrical information when available.

Today EDIF has diminished in prominence as newer formats and workflows have emerged, such as Verilog and VHDL for HDL descriptions, LEF/DEF for physical design, and standardization efforts around digital design interchange. It remains useful for legacy designs and certain toolchains that still support it, serving as an example of early attempts at vendor-neutral data exchange in electronic design automation.