These circuits can contain a combination of transistors, resistors, capacitors or specialized components such as analog neural networks, antennas or fuses.
Errors may be present in the high-level code already, such as for the Pentium FDIV floating-point unit bug, or it can be inserted all the way down to physical synthesis, such as a missing wire, or a timing violation.
The properties of a specific semiconductor foundry, such as the transistor models, the physical characteristics and the design rules, are usually encoded in file formats which are proprietary to one or more EDA vendors.
Micro-Cap was released as freeware in July 2019, when its parent company Spectrum Software closed down while LTSpice has been free for a long time.
[8][9][better source needed] High-level synthesis software can generally be used for the design of both application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).
Most high-level synthesis software is used to edit and verify code written in one of the mainstream hardware description languages (HDL) like VHDL or Verilog.