schematic tools

i dont know.

martin

It would be informative to know why you ask the question. Here is a previous thread on this:

. .

They usually come as a suite. Mixing & matching doesn't generally work.

*-companies-don't-want-you-to-*-*-*-translate-between-tools

There are several major packages offered by the big CAD vendors. They are also very costly.

Thee are many alternatives more reasonably priced.

Take your pick.

Graham

None is 'mostly used by all major companies'.

If only it were that simple !

Graham

Just wait until Microsoft starts making EDA tools. :-)

If they can't even code a competent word processor what makes you think I'd wait for their undoubtedly feeble attempts at EDA ?

Graham

I realise it was a joke, but for sure, Microsoft simply wouldn't be interested in such a small market !

Graham

When I worked at Big Company, we ussd Mentor Graphics high-end tools. These tools have a lot of features that are only beneficial to large companies. Also, while it seems that the backend part of the software is robust, the frontend (GUI) leaves a little bit to be desired. The software is so expensive that only a major company can buy it (or would want to).

Anyway, I believe the individual tools I used were the design manager (aka design mangler) protoview (for looking at the layout), and ICX, which is a signal integrity simulator that can read the mentor graphics layout file and create a signal integrity model on the fly. You have to add ibis models for the nets you want to simulate.

A lot of application engineers use orcad capture for their evaluation board designs. I use this occasionally at my current job. This is probably a better commercial offering for a small company. I don't have first hand experience with any other commercial software.

For non-commercial software, the gEDA suite seems to be the way to go. You can use gschem for schematic capture, and pcb for layout. Both are under active development and getting better all the time.

It seems like cadence and mentor have gobbled up just about all the major EDA software, so you might just go look at their websites.

--Mac

The most recent ready -to-run Windoze gEDA binaries are dated September 2003.

This means that to use gEDA, you will have to do one of the following:

1) Use a 2-year-old Windows-compatible release. 2) Compile your own current Windows-compatible executables. 3) Set up a Linux box and run the current Linux binaries. 4) Set up a Linux box and compile your own Linux-compatible executables.

Another open source project (gratis and libre) is one which makes it easy to run itself under Windoze: KiCAD.