Hi - so recently talking with someone I mentioned that I use Cadsoft's Eagle for schematic capture and board design. They were quite surprised, and said that Eagle is not used hardly at all in the professional world, and employers would much prefer to see a different program listed on my resume (as I will soon be applying for jobs, being a 3rd year EE). He specifically suggested orcad and pcad. I just thought it'd be best to get a second opinion, though I expect he knows what he's talking about. What do you all think? Thanks,
Orcad is pretty standard in medium-large businesses. Protel has a lot of use in small businesses. Use Cadence Concept if you have a masochistic tendency and want to work for big companies...
Cadence products and PAIN do seem to go hand-in-hand ;-)
...Jim Thompson
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| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
If you can use one of the programs you can learn to use all of them, though with the less user-friendly ones you forget stuff if you stop using it for a couple of weeks.
I'm sure Charlie Edmondson is right - Orcad and Protel probably cameprobably name more customers than anybody else, while Cadence might have more seats.
Check out sci.electronics.cad for a better informed opinion.
There are quite a few other programs out there - I've used Metheus (probably long extinct), several flavours of Orcad, and Ultiboard, and one mob that I worked for used the PADS program. Bartels AutoEngineer has its fans ...
I like gEDA myself. It's Linux/GNU software, and if you don't like what it does, you can dive into the source code and improve it. Not that I can - in my programing days I was a master of Fortran 4, and I've yet to make the switch to C and Python.
Someone who only cares about what schematic capture program you're used to either wants a draftsman or they don't know what they're talking about. I would take a resume listing for _any_ second schematic capture program to mean that you are ready to learn whatever one comes your way.
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Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com
It's the end product you designed that matters, not the tools used... Sheesh, do you also mention on your resume the brand soldering iron used to solder the parts to the pcb?
All I can do is share my experience. At my first job, a very large company, we used Mentor Graphics Design Architect tools. I was designing single board computers (12 layers) with Intel PC-type processors. There is no way you will be using these tools unless you get a job working for a big company. ;-) And while the tools are very powerful in many respects, they are also kind of clunky. I mainly used the schematic entry tool, and the layout inspection tool. I didn't work on layout myself.
At my next job, where I still work, we use orcad capture. There is nothing wrong with this tool, and many reference designs or eval boards are done with it.
At home, I have been experimenting with gschem, which is free software (it is part of gEDA, which you can learn more about at geda.seul.org). I don't think you can easily run it on Windows (although it may work under cygwin), but if you have a linux box you should be able to get it up and running easily. It is quirky, but overall, I like it. Whether people out there in the industry use it, I have no idea.
If you spend the time to get familiar with gschem and pcb (by harry eaton, et. al) you will have tools you can take with you anywhere you go, and which will allow you to be reasonably productive on boards up to 8 layers.
I would agree that it's the end product, and if you've mastered one decent capture tool, you can master others.
I have used a number of capture tools, including Eagle, OrCad and Protel, and they each had their pros and cons. Moving to another one was largely a matter of finding the new naming convention for operations and what the hot keys were. All of the packages have their quirks, strengths and weaknesses of course.
On the comment about Cadence - Cadence bought OrCad some time ago, which explains how it suddenly got loaded up with features and pain ;) Cadence is no longer selling OrCad, by the way - they are trying to migrate users to their newer packages.
OrCad used to be the "standard" but it rarely got high marks in evaluations and usually in my experience failed to get the nod for the one program to settle on. I'm a longtime p-cad user (originally called Tango). It's been owned for sometime now by Altium, who originally introduced the Protel product mentioned above. We were worried when Altium bought p-cad, but they have made steady improvements to p-cad, despite it being a program that was already mature and highly refined, provided you ignore the painful library management issue, that is. But then, all the CAD programs seem to have very painful library quality and management issues.
One thing about p-cad, over the years I've been surprised to find most of my circle of electronics friends, at least here in Massachusetts, are using p-cad. Only one uses OrCad, and he's using an old DOS version. Of the two pcb designers that I taught at my old engineering company, Sea Data, one uses p-cad and the other, who is now in Colorado, uses Protel. So I'm looking forward to the p-cad = Protel link-up that Altium promises for the next release.
OK, back to the PCB layout I'm editing for shipment to the PC house - it should have gone out yesterday or the day before! But first, just to add in one more feature I dreamed up...
One more thing. If I were starting over now, I'd take a careful look at Protel, because of its claimed integration with FPGA and cPLD design. If this works as advertised, it means the FPGA pins can be automatically swapped as the PCB layout progresses, avoiding a painful chance for serious IC pinout errors. That would be an important capability, but provided I could still use my preferred FPGA design tools.
One final thing, Michael. I suggest that you ignore the schematic-capture / PCB integration with Spice that many programs (including p-cad) have and claim to be desirable. This is NOT an important capability, for a few dozen good reasons I've detailed previously here on s.e.d., so one shouldn't let it influence his choice, in my opinion.
Sure they are. It's just handled by EMA-EDA for the small user. I was recently contacted, with them wondering why I could be using Capture and PSpice and NOT doing boards ;-)
Disclaimer: I only use Capture as a translation tool when requested by my customers. I use PSpice Schematics for schematic entry.
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
This might be correct for the US, but at least in Germany there are not many electronic companies that do *not* use EAGLE for professional work.
Besides, the comments in the other replies apply. It's the work that matters, not the tool (though EAGLE is a good tool :-) ).
[I'm not affiliated with CadSoft, but I am using EAGLE for many years, and I have seen a few other packages too - which often were much more expensive...]
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Dipl.-Ing. Tilmann Reh
http://www.autometer.de - Elektronik nach Maß.
It depends on the company. If you work for a small company, where you do your own layout, a large part of the job will be doing sustaining of older designs and they will need some one who can work with the tools used to make them in the first place. It applies to FPGA stuff too. It's good to list the tools you've used on your resume as well as the languages and brands of processors and FPGAs you worked with. Skills can be as important as knowledge and they both require a learning curve. Maybe the brand of soldering iron doesn't matter, but it is important to find out if the guy you're hiring knows which end to hold on to, if that's what you're going to expect him to be doing.
Oh yes. Just got burned by that and now I have to "semi-invert" some SOT23 on a board that came back from fab. CAD programs seem haphazard in pin numbering and so it seems for some manufacturers. IMHO the CAD scene is notoriously poor in agreeing on pin numbering standards. Or any standards for that matter.
Hmm... I thought only Sales & Marketing introduces feature creep ;-)
Maybe you are right. I have often heard the saying and actually seen it: A firmware designer will sometimes fill up the ROM space of a uC to well above 95% regardless of the complexity of the task.
I read in sci.electronics.design that Joerg wrote (in ) about 'best schematic capture/board editor program to learn for professional world?', on Sat,
10 Sep 2005:
Absolutely not. It's the chief bane of highly creative designers. They are never ready to release the product for production, because in a few days/weeks/month/years they will have a product that is 1000% better, half the price and will convert Australian audio engineers into human beings.(;-)
--
Regards, John Woodgate, OOO - Own Opinions Only.
If everything has been designed, a god designed evolution by natural selection.
http://www.jmwa.demon.co.uk Also see http://www.isce.org.uk
The first two promises can be difficult to deliver, but degrading Australian audio engineers to merely human only requires brain surgery or a cask of beer. I can understand why a U.K. audio engineer might want to do this, but it would probably get you into trouble with UN mob who look after the world's cultural heritage.
-------- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen (but an Australian citizen)
I read in sci.electronics.design that Pooh Bear wrote (in ) about 'best schematic capture/board editor program to learn for professional world?', on Sat, 10 Sep 2005:
A miracle of the 3rd altitude. (;-)
--
Regards, John Woodgate, OOO - Own Opinions Only.
If everything has been designed, a god designed evolution by natural selection.
http://www.jmwa.demon.co.uk Also see http://www.isce.org.uk
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