Cadence killing off Orcad PCB Layout

Anton, This letter was released to OrCAD users in the spring of 2007. I am surprised that you are even able to get a quote for OrCAD. As you can see that letter stated that they would not be selling any OrCAD PCB packages past July 31st of last year.

"This letter is intended to communicate some important developments regarding the future of Cadence OrCAD Layout. Cadence has begun the End-of-Life process for Cadence OrCAD Layout technology based products.

Please Note: Cadence OrCAD Capture, OrCAD Capture CIS, and PSpice® technology are all integral parts of Cadence's long-term product strategy and are not affected by this notice.

Effective July 31, 2007, Cadence will no longer sell the following Cadence OrCAD Layout based technology products:

1. OrCAD Layout (PO1410)
2. OrCAD Layout Plus (PO1420)
3. OrCAD Unison PCB (PO1510)
4. OrCAD Unison Ultra (PO1530)
5. Layout Studio (PS1430)

We acknowledge that transitioning software systems is never easy and is often a juggling act between investing in learning new technologies and meeting current business priorities. EMA is committed to ensuring we do everything possible to help minimize the impact on you, wherever possible. To help ease the transition, Cadence is providing OrCAD Layout customers with multiple paths for migrating to new technology that leverages the power of Allegro PCB Editor. Learn more about the various transition path options by visiting

The products entering End of Sale will be supported thru March 31, 2009. After that date, these products will no longer be supported for hot-fixes or support calls and will not be shipped on the OrCAD CD set. "

--
Sincerely,
Brad Velander.

"Anton Erasmus"  wrote in message 
news:gmb4q3lgcd90g55n0ib0divclpug647obg@4ax.com...
>
> I asked for a quote for OrCad from our local agent. Together with the
> quote, they sent a letter from Cadence in which they stated that
> OrCAD PCB Layout will only be sold up to the middle of this year.
> After this it will not be available anymore.
>
> Regards
>  Anton Erasmus
>

Sorry, misread the dates.

The local agent probalby have some old stock they are trying to offload.

Regards Anton Erasmus

There are too many PCBCAD software vendors chasing too few customers.

There is loads of free and cheap stuff without having to spend hundreds or thousands on software.

Ah, the old *make your brand look like a generic reference* thing. You can't pass up an opportunity to SPAM for your crapware, can you?

*.*.*.any.good+zz-zz+qq+*.htm+uu+*.better.presentation.would.help.*.*+*-hard-to-read-*-*-*-*-*-*-website-*+kk+*.*.*.ugliest.schematics.and.pcb.layouts.I've.seen.in.a.long.time

Business philosophy:

*-*-the-ethics+uu-uu+suckers

How many customers are there Marra, show us your smarts!

Yeah there is loads of cheap or free crap out there. Like everything else in life, you get what you pay for.

-- Sincerely, Brad Velander.

But why spend =A31,000 when =A320 will do a very good job?

I have designed dozens of boards with the software i have and never had any problems or complaints.

What you paid yourself GBP 20 ? Most people do not complain to themselves.

Anton Erasmus

Because many £20 programs -- such as yours -- don't have nearly the features that £1000 programs do.

I would be the first to admit that plenty of £1000 programs are crap, though, and not worth nearly the asking price. But there are other £1000 programs that are worth every penny...

ures

ough,

rams

But my =A320 program does everything I want !!!!

I have found the more expensive packages come with bug lists ! Mine doesnt have a bug list coz I fixed the ones I have found !

OK, but just for the sake of discussion here, one thing that we find quite valuable where I work is the ability to tie in schematic capture to our MRP system. This means that when you go to place a part, if you figure it'd a part that we've used before, you can browse or search all the "database" parts, find the part you want, and it'll automatically fill in all the various part attributes that your database tells it to (e.g., component value, manufacturer name & part no., tolerances, etc.). The ability to link to any ODBC-complaint database is pretty nice in that it keeps as much information about the parts your company is using in one place.

Your program doesn't do that, does it? (I certainly wouldn't expect it would for the price...)

"I have found the more expensive packages come with bug lists ! Mine doesnt have a bug list coz I fixed the ones I have found !"

Hey, that's quite commendable. I'm sure your customers appreciate it.

---Joel

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With mine its even simpler you just merge in parts of older designs which you know work !

Why use a sledgehammer to crack a nut ?

In a lot of my designs I often start from a previous schematic.

My software can update/replace any component you like with another one. Not bad for =A320 !!!!

If you're only using old parts, that's fine.

"Why use a sledgehammer to crack a nut ?"

Because some nuts are so tough to crack that you need a sledgehammer? :-)

I have a suspicion here that you haven't had experience attempting to apply your tools at a company that's doing dozens of different designs every year, ordering hundreds of different parts every month, and yet still trying to make their engineers' lives as simple (productive) as possible while not driving logistics and purchasing insane in the process.

"My software can update/replace any component you like with another one. Not bad for £20 !!!!"

Agreed. Your competition is stuff like gEDA and the "free" (with a catch) versions of software that Express PCB and Advanced Circuits put out, not ORCAD/PADS/etc... Possibly Eagle, although even Eagle has a very complete scripting language if you want to get fancy, whereas your software doesn't, right? (But Eagle does cost noticeably more too...)

---Joel

Have you guys found a system that does that? We've tried in one company, combining Agile, our older accounting system plus OrCad, AutoCad and such. None of the CAD systems were allowing a useful MRP link. Sure, you could find schematics and OrCad would automatically pop up. But picking parts from MRP into an open schematic page, with pricing popping up and stuff, nope, didn't do it.

This is exactly the question I asked the Agile guys and then they were scratching their heads. Other than that it was a good system but it didn't go that far. The only systems that were able to come close were the ones my father dealt with at IBM, back in the days of central processing and terminals where MRP and CAD came from the same vendor. Usually at rather steep seat prices but it worked.

[...]

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Hi Joerg,

Sort of.

For production items we use ORCAD and it was previously tied into a home-grown database. The guy who wrote the database maintenance program was a (particularly good) summer intern, so when he left it began to slowly fall into disarray and it became clear that some of the program's architecture was not as conducive to getting design work done as we'd have liked. Still, while it was maintained it did prove valuable.

Flash forward to the present. We're currently installing one of those big, fancy MRP systems and our ("not a database programmer") IT guy has been tasked with getting it integrated with ORCAD. I know that he's encountered some problems while doing so, but sooner or later all of this is supposed to come together and make life a little bit easier again in that generated BOMs will have correct manufacturers' part numbers in them.

This has been taking longer than the company originally anticipated, but I've been involved with the adoption of "big fancy MRP systems" at a previous company and I'm personally not surprised. Such systems often seem to consume enormous amounts of a company's time and money before they begin producing useful results!

This is what ORCAD CIS does (lets you browse a database that can have whatever fields you want, e.g., component name, type, value, manufacturer's part no., price, etc.). It doesn't do it as well as it should -- every time you go to place another database part it collapses the tree of all your parts categories and has several other productivity-sapping annoyances -- but it does work. Pulsonix has their database connectivity option that claims it'll do the same things -- and in a somewhat less brain-dead manner -- but I've only read the documentation for it and not actually tried it out on a real project. From past discussions on here Protel and CADStar claim some degree of database connectivity as well.

---Joel

That's what they all do :-)

Yep, this stuff needs to be fully documented or it falls apart really fast.

I don't want to be your IT guy right now. OrCad has great stuff such as lots of additional part fields, something that took Cadsoft many years to add. But I never saw OrCad seemlessly integrate those with a standard database. However, I didn't try anything past 9.3 or whatever it was called because it crashed too often. Now that they seem to have axed OrCad Layout I probably won't touch it anyways.

We had Agile up and running pretty fast but we also invested lots into employee training at the earliest possible time. In the training room we first had a mock system set up so we could test the heck out of it without any risks. Then we'd call them in every now and then and told them that we found this, that and the other thing that needed to be changed.

Would be nice to hear some success stories from users. Maybe you'll have one soon. I sure hope it works.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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I dont provide a scripting language because I consider I provide everything anyone might need. Having said that there is no reason why someone cant put the parts lists into a spread sheet etc.

The software was written while I was a electronics design consultant and had modules added as needed. So the software was used over dozens of different projects.

Even to this day I add more modules as I feel fit. The current project is a 3D viewer of the PCB of which the first version is out now.

Hi Marra,

Ironically the reason programs provide scripting languages is because they realize that it's generally impossible to provide "everything anyone might need." :-)

One of the frequency-asked-for features over on the Yahoo! Pulsonix group is either a scripting language of a COM interface. I'd certainly appreciate having one...

---Joel

Eagle has the scripting feature. Unfortunately it does not support a hierarchical sheet structures so it's out for a lot of serious work.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/