Hi Kevin,

At Loral Aeronutronic (formerly Ford Aerospace) we migrated
from Sci-cards to Cadnetix and 4 years ago to Cadence.
We established evaluation criteria to meet our requirements
and evaluated 4 CAD systems with a benchmark design. The benchmark
represented our most complex pwb (at that time). The companies
competing were Cadnetix (Intergraph), Mentor Graphics, Cadence and
Computervision (Theda). The benchmark hands down was won by Cadence
and the Prance XL router was most impressive, completion time as well
as less routing layers. Another requirement that we had that highly 
contributed to our selection was simulation.
Also a big concern to us was conversion of libraries and data bases 
from CDX (D). As you may remember, we have pretty stiff documentation
requirements being a mil house, level 3 drawings prompted us to develop
our own in house library of schematic symbols to meet mil/microfilmability
requirements. We xferred CDX libraries and several boards in work.
Cadence tools definitely have a steeper learner curve!! I found Cadence AE's
to be extemely helpful and actully rode shootgun with us during our first
designs. Presently we are under the Sun Os (unix) operating system but we
will be changing to Solaris to be compatible with Computervision our mech
CAD system. We have been sucessful in xfering mech board outlines from CV
into Allegro, populating pwbs and then xfering back to CV for component
nesting studies.
Since our CDX days our designs have become denser, and finer pitches,
double sided, fine lines. We have been very sucessful using Cadence Concept
(schematic capture) and Allegro (pwb layout) tools. 
I would highly recommend Cadence Design Systems.

p.s. Enjoyed your article in Printed Circuit Design

Dianne L. Boehm
Loral Aeronutronic
Rancho Santa Margarita, CA
714 459-4490
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