PCB drawing

Hi all, Which PCB program does Professional use? PCAD is better than ORCAD and PADS or which one is better??????? I have got ORCAD experience and I think ORCAD is not comfortable at advance PCB. What do you think about PCB programs?

Reply to
icegray
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"icegray" a écrit dans le message de news: snipped-for-privacy@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

Protel DXP is good but BIG price..

for very low budget, have a look (and try it) at Rimu PCB, very nice for the price :

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Reply to
fred*

icegray schrieb:

I am using EAGLE for many years, and I think its price/performance ratio is very good.

--
Dipl.-Ing. Tilmann Reh
http://www.autometer.de - Elektronik nach Maß.
Reply to
Tilmann Reh

How many pins do you need ?

I'm currently getting to grips with the free 256 pin version of Vutrax.

See:

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Be advised that it does have a big learning curve.

Simon.

--
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP       
Scientific Theory: A testable hypothesis that is supported by a body of evidence
Reply to
Simon Clubley

Pulsonix is excellent - bugs get fixed very quickly and it is easy to use:

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It's somewhat cheaper than Orcad, PADS and Protel.

Leon

Reply to
Leon

Have a look at TARGET3001!

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Great PCB program with lots of support. ..richard

Reply to
betterone1

Have a look at TARGET3001!

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Great PCB program with lots of support. ..richard

Reply to
betterone1

Reply to
Jona Vark

We use PCAD in my company and its excellent for professional use.Personal i prefer PROTEL because i feel more flexible for my projects.Finaly these two programms are the best choice for a prof use.

Marios Lazos

Reply to
Marios Lazos

Do you know if PCAD supports scripting? I have used Eagle for some years now, and one of the things I love in it is its scripting capabilities. Very useful to define rectangular or polar arrays of any structure. There are other things that I don't like so much, though, such as copying/moving objects across libraries.

Best.

Reply to
codic

Try ExpressPCB . It is free.

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Reply to
Ganesh Sathya Narayanan

It does but I've no idea how useful it is, coz I've never used it. There is a macro record facility that records files like:

SchMacro sch_default 'Created by LCAPUA on Tue Feb 09 15:41:43 1999 SendKeys "{ALT+U}{Z}{Tab}{A}" SendKeys "{SHIFT+N}{O}" SendKeys "{T}{E}{SHIFT+P}{A}" SendKeys "{D}{Tab}{N}{O}" SendKeys "{T}{E}{P}{A}" SendKeys "{D}{Period}{E}{X}" SendKeys "{E}{Tab}{Tab}{Tab}" SendKeys "{Tab}{Tab}{Enter}" End

which I guess you can edit (That one was one of the supplied ones). There's also a programming interface which lets you write applets in C or VBasic to extend the program - it can interact with the running programs and the loaded schematics and PCBs. As I said, I've used neither method, although I have resorted to editing the ASCII data files with a text editor, the syntax is pretty easy to infer and it's a quick way of making lots of some types of changes.

I like PCad, but I'd have to admit I've not used anything else. It can be annoying, though, in that a PCB layout package is really just an enhanced drawing package (eg AutoCad) but it doesn't let you do a lot of fairly primitive operations like arbitrary rotations, mirroring about abitrary lines, scaling and stretching (scaling on only a single axis). However, it's perfectly adequate for PCB layout, but just fails to meet it's full potential.

It's quite expensive though, for some values of expensive. Alternatively it's quite cheap for other values of cheap. It depends on your perspective. Of the top of my heaad it was about UKú1500 or so per seat and another 500 per annum for maintenance, but I could be confusing it with one of the many other software packages we have :-)

--
Nobby
Reply to
Nobody Here

What programs do professionals use? All of them, depending on the needs of the company. I have used most of the usual culprits, and it comes down to just what features you need. If you don't need 30+ layer boards, you probably don't need Cadence or Mentor tools (apart from their cost anyway). Eagle, Protel, PCad and others can do most things in layout unless you need really advanced features.

So my questions would be (for a start, anyway)

Are you dealing with 1000s of nets? Do you need high multilayer support? Do you need integration with a signal analysis tool (such as SpectraQuest or PSpice) Do you need to set advanced routing rules? (e.g. Multiple nets for differential pairs) What level of autorouting do you need? (if you need it at all)

The answers to those will help determine what package you really need. There was a thread on this in S.E.D not so long ago - the further up the toolchain you go, the steeper the learning curve.

Cheers

PeteS

Reply to
PeteS

I've been using an open source tool for several years called pcb which is integrated into the gEDA project.

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If you pull the sources from sf.net for pcb, you might want to ignore the latest release pcb-20050609 which was their first stab at using GTK2 for the back end (it's horribly slow for anything other than trival layouts)

Previous releases, pcb-20050315 and earlier and built on std X librarys and have crisp performance on even slow machines. Binaries have been build under cygwin and gcc for windows machines and perform well for those that are not using a UNIX, Linux, FreeBSD or OS-X Mac desktop.

Reply to
air_bits

The other open source tool you could consider is Kicad. Runs on Linux and Windows. look for it here:

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Ian

Reply to
Ian Bell

You think autoroter is useful when using CSP, BGA products?

Reply to
icegray

Whether you can or should use an autorouter is not an easy question to answer. If you are using CSP and BGA parts, you should (usually) break them out yourself and let the autorouter run after constraining it (fix nets you do not want ripped up, such as power islands on otherwise signal layers, or certain signals that should not move for one reason or another).

So an autorouter can be useful where there are many non-critical signals or many signals where you can set specific rules (and the autorouter obeys them).

Much also depends on the signalling speeds, as autorouters tend to be pretty useless at really high frequencies (such as InfiniBand, PCI Express, Fibre channel etc). It *can* be a boon for point to point memory (but a bane for distributed systems as it is difficult to set the rules precisely in most packages).

Cheers

PeteS

Reply to
PeteS

I've never used an autorouter that can handle the dense routing that BGA's create. I've even given hand routed netlists to others to autoroute only to have the autorouter create a mess of the space with vias and generally not even be able to route the existing design (Cadence router last year on a PC104+ design with BG560, several large QFP/TSOP packages and misc parts. that was already hand routed with PCB).

Routing BGA's, especially those with more than 500 pads, is very difficult to do manhattan, and generally requires establishing "flows" of traces in both dimensions to connect to cpus, memory and connectors which have high pinouts. This requires a lot of placement thought.

The big advantage of hand routing BGAs is choosing pins/pads to route easy, not picking pins/pads arbitrarily and hoping the pins swap function (if any) can get it right.

Reply to
Totally_Lost

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