SiQAD

SiQAD (Silicon Quantum Atomic Designer) is a next-generation CAD tool that enables the design and simulation of silicon dangling bond (Si-DB) circuits through an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) and a modular simulation back-end. The tool currently offers simulators that predict ground-state and dynamic electron configuration of given Si-DB configurations, and electrostatics simulation given electrode layouts. There are a few key resources available:

• Feel free to join our official Slack team for SiQAD-related discussion and support!
• Please read the SiQAD Documentation hosted on Read the Docs. A helpful Basic Tutorial is provided to get you started through a step-by-step tutorial. Other details regarding SiQAD are also documented on the site.
• Please read the SiQAD publication on IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology (open access) for a detailed introduction to the tool and simulators.
• The Walus Lab website contains information about us and other projects that we work on.

Binary releases

Binary builds for Windows are available in the Releases page. Note that one of the first-party simulators, PoisSolver, is not available on Windows builds due to incompatibility of its dependencies. For more information, please refer to the Windows installation section in our official documentation.

For Linux, our PPA is out of date. For now please compile from source.

Building from source

Ubuntu

1. Install build dependencies:

# 22.04 LTS
sudo apt install cmake pkg-config python3-pip python3-tk python3-venv make gcc g++ qt6-base-dev qt6-tools-dev libqt6charts6-dev libqt6uitools6 libqt6svg6-dev libboost-dev libboost-filesystem-dev libboost-system-dev libboost-thread-dev libboost-random-dev libxkbcommon-dev

# 24.04 LTS
sudo apt install cmake pkg-config python3-pip python3-tk python3-venv make gcc g++ qt6-base-dev qt6-tools-dev qt6-svg-dev qt6-charts-dev libqt6charts6 libqt6uitools6 libqt6svg6 libboost-dev libboost-filesystem-dev libboost-system-dev libboost-thread-dev libboost-random-dev

2. Run the build script from project root

./make_everything_dev release

Or substitute release with debug if so desired.

3. Run the compiled binary

./build/release/siqad

Substitute release with debug if you used the debug flag in the previous step.

Note that PoisSolver currently might not work with Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04.

macOS

Once you have installed Xcode and other required dependencies, steps 2 and 3 from the Ubuntu compilation section should work for you. An easy way to get the required packages is through Homebrew. The following packages are needed:

• CMake
• Boost
• Qt6

Windows

You can refer to our Windows binary build workflow to get a sense of the required packages and build workflow.

Licensing

The open source version of Qt5 falls under the GNU LGPL v3 license, as does the GUI code. Qt5 includes some packages which include third-party content under different licenses. If these are used their specific licenses must be considered. Refer to http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/licenses-used-in-qt.html for a list of third-party licensed libraries.