Advanced PCB Design

Hi All, I have been using Orcad last five years for schematic and pcb design. I think Orcad has bugs, it hasn't got useful tools specially at PCB design. So I want to use a different eda tool and we plan to use PCAD-2006. Our designs have got high speed tools and lines, BGA packs, a lot of SMD device, etc. Anybody have recommend about pcad or others (Pads, Allegro, Altium Designer)? Thanks

Reply to
icegray
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I know Pads, Orcad, Eagle, old Tango and at beginner level Altium and Protel (and a little PCAD). From the perspective of schematic capture, Orcad is my favourite. From the BGA editing and library manipulation perspective, Pads is the first one. From the autorouter perspective I can't say anything. All are nasty. Some specialists say that Altium Designer is the best for huge designs, but in my evaluation process I found Altium difficult for use, with a lot of documentation splitted in too many documents. Pads is difficult too, at least aparently has less documentation and better organised. Any program will be, imagine you need a longer learning curve than you've spend for Orcad, so choose well.

Reply to
vasile

Well, if you use the whole package (Orcad + Allegro + SpectraQuest) you

*do* have a high speed design package.

I am not affiliated with them, but I have done successful high speed design in that environment (think thousands of 5Gb/s links).

Most current tools support such things, but expect to pay through the nose for them.

Cheers

PeteS

Reply to
PeteS

I think so Orcad is very good about schematic capture but PCB design is very bad. Allegro and Orcad interfaces are same? Can we say If you use Orcad you can use Allegro easily?

Reply to
icegray

P-CAD is effectively being phased out in favour of Altium Designer, (Altium own P-CAD) Read this:

formatting link

Altium Designer is the only "unified" product available, which means it has integrated support for FPGA's, embedded processing, and signal integrity.

I would strongly recommend Altium Designer instead of P-CAD.

Dave.

Reply to
David L. Jones

vasile wrote: : perspective, Pads is the first one. From the autorouter perspective I : can't say anything. All are nasty.

In the old days when Pads was bundled with the Specctra router, I recall feeling the relief that finally there is an autorouter capable to perform a decent routing job, after tweaking its options a bit. The router in the current Pads versions is as bad as any other I've seen.

Does anybody else share this appreciation to the Specctra, or is it just that the time has gilded my memories?

Regards, Mikko

Reply to
Mikko S Kiviranta

Thanks David this is very helpful.

Reply to
icegray

Thanks David this pdf is very helpful.

Reply to
icegray

Thanks David this pdf is very helpful.

Reply to
icegray

Thanks David this pdf is very helpful.

Reply to
icegray

A while back, I spent some time evaluating both Allegro and Altium designer as a replacement for the discontinued P-CAD that I have been using. Of the two, I felt that the Allegro was a lot more focused on designing boards and Altium Designer was trying to follow the Eclipse concept of one unified IDE. Company management decided that they didn't want to spend the money to upgrade at the time, but given the choice, I would have chosen the Allegro hands down.

Reply to
Noway2

The integrated tool suite from Cadence (not available directly any more) includes OrCad and Allegro - they are both owned by Cadence so netlists etc. transfer easily.

Cheers

PeteS

Reply to
PeteS

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