We use Cadence Allegro for PCB layout at work. A new starter who used Alti um at a previous company has been so forthright about how much they prefer it that our CTO has asked me to investigate the differences. I was wonderi ng if anyone here knows both products and could offer an opinion?
If Allegro is the more sophisticated package, it may be more powerful than we really need. We are currently making our own footprints and not using a ny parts databases. Apparently, generating gerbers is a single click in Al tium, whereas we must visit a series of menus and dialogs to do it in Alleg ro, although I have been recommended a third-party plug-in which might spee d this up.
I know nothing of Allegro, but despise Altium schematic capture. Unless you use it a lot, it's just arcane. The PCB layout part is pretty good.
It's also quite expensive, and I get the impression that in order to justify the cost, they have to keep updating with pointless (for most people) added-value features which just add to the bloat.
Get this: it's software supposedly designed for electronics engineers. It can't order resistors by value, it does it alphabetically. OK, not a huge deal, but indicative of general sloppiness.
tium at a previous company has been so forthright about how much they prefe r it that our CTO has asked me to investigate the differences. I was wonde ring if anyone here knows both products and could offer an opinion?
n we really need. We are currently making our own footprints and not using any parts databases. Apparently, generating gerbers is a single click in Altium, whereas we must visit a series of menus and dialogs to do it in All egro, although I have been recommended a third-party plug-in which might sp eed this up.
tium at a previous company has been so forthright about how much they prefe r it that our CTO has asked me to investigate the differences. I was wonde ring if anyone here knows both products and could offer an opinion?
n we really need. We are currently making our own footprints and not using any parts databases. Apparently, generating gerbers is a single click in Altium, whereas we must visit a series of menus and dialogs to do it in All egro, although I have been recommended a third-party plug-in which might sp eed this up.
I don't know Allegro (I use Altium now and used to be pretty good at Orcad) , but I can't imagine anything they could do re generating Gerbers would ma ke much difference in total. The gerbers only take a click once you've set up the output job, but that takes time. I guess it saves a bit of time on r espins.
The time your "new guy" spent learning the quirks of his package is going t o be wasted (from your perspective) learning the quirks of some other packa ge. For him, he learns a new program and probably increases his employabil ity.
We upgraded to v17, I haven't bothered actually installing it yet. There ar e some features that will come in handy on the next rigid-flex PCB. Apparen tly V18 will finally handle multiple PCB projects properly. Right now I hav e to trick it into doing it by creating a dummy project.
If you do a lot of multi-channel stuff, Altium handles that pretty nicely ( though I don't have much to compare it to).
I have used Altium, Pads, Orcad, and a one that I don't remember the name o f any more
I prefer Altium, the schematics entry is excellent and component generation easy. It's intuitive and handles big project well. I have a list of often used commands that is done easier in Altium, but changing CAD system needs to be not just some features, but weighing up productivity of all the users in the old and new system, not to mention the conversion time needed for t he libraries
If you start from scratch, then the descision is easier
I do not use Altium myself but saw it being used at a client, helped a bit with a tough layout and my impression when it comes to user interaction with the Altium software is good. It it expensive though.
Like the others have said, you and your CTO should consider the downtime, extra work and training that a change costs. And additional biggie are all your existing schematics and layouts which could become incompatible with your new CAD unless there is an ironclad transfer mechanism. I would certainly try that transfer as well as that for library parts before taking the plunge. Try it on the most complex schematics and layouts your have.
If your company is in a heavily regulated field you would then also have to maintain two file sets for existing products that still have new releases coming out. One for Cadence and one for Altium. More work and thus cost for the doc center folks.
IMO changing CAD systems only makes sense if there is a very compelling reason and there are few of those. As a self-employed engineer I changed CAD only once in decades and that was because the old system's company was bought by big corp. It became so crash-prone that I had to ditch it. The transition was not pain-free because a reliable schematic and library translation method did not exist back then.
Well, I use Protel 99SE, which is the predecessor to Altium Designer. I'm still using Protel, as it does what I need. Yes, Gerber generation is quite simple. There are a number of options that can be set, but once set, there is only one I have to touch (relative origin). Otherwise, they are all set to the defaults I want.
Footprint creation is simple, you can customize key bindings and menu items in both schematic and PCB, custom 1 and 2-key shortcuts. It is very fast to use, I don't know if there is anything modern that can be run that quickly. MANY, MANY years ago, Orcad was as fast or faster at general editing, but some stuff like custom footprints and custom schematic components was totally dark age technology.
Changing to a new package is very costly both in purchasing the software and in retraining, new libraries and either maintaining two sets of legacy projects or updating them all to the new package.
So today I was talking to a CAD guy about a new schematics, one in which I need to be able to work with a hierarchical flow, being able to select a co nfiguration, so that in one case certain parts of the schematics are enable d (used) and in another case other parts are enabled, but using the same co mmon part
I was told it could not be done. That is really simple in Altium and I woul d have thought any CAD tool would have that ability. Talk about crappy SW ( hope I am wrong)
Is the schematic used to create different raw boards or different stuffing options for a single physical board? It makes a difference for a lot of packages.
Is this "CAD guy" from the FAE, or just someone who everyone thinks is smart? He may not know everything about the software and may not even understand hierarchical design. I did quite a bit of it with OrCad (yuck!) but it seems that no one else could understand the schematics so it was all flattened after I left.
I'm a longtime Altium user, and have used Allegro as well for a few years. I found the Allegro learning curve really steep (still haven't mastered it) and it is undoubtedly a more powerful package than Altium.
If I were doing layouts for a living (as a contract layout guy for example) Allegro is the package I'd choose between the two. For someone with no prior experience of either of them I'd recommend Allegro.
If you're doing primarily low frequency Analogue designs either will do the job just fine. For hand routed high speed digital (lots of matched traces) Allegro is the better option. For auto routed digital Allegro (with specctra) is the better option. Likewise for RF and SI.
The Altium autorouter and autoplacer tools are next to useless. The SI plugin gives results which do not agree with other established SI tools, so I don't trust it.
Perhaps the most annoying thing about Altium is that they pretty much never fix any annoying bugs. There's lot's of things that almost work, but which need some sort of work around. Having said that, in over 20 years Altium has never generated a bad gerber file, the gerbers have allways represented correctly what I've had on screen, and at the end of the day that's what matters.
Incidentally, in the US Orcad standard (schematic with layout) is on offer for about $430. At that price it's a no brainer.
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