Stay away from Mentor...their simulation products are good, but the pcb
design products are cumbersome, buggy, high maintenance, and their expertise
in support is lacking.
Orcad is a good generic tool. Orcad is known primarily for their schematic
capture. Which is very good, easy to use, and very straightforward. The
layout tool has an excellent interface package to a variety of programs. I
found it to be a good generic inexpensive toolset. I personally would never
use the Orcad PCB Layout tools. Lacking in flexibility.
Without going overboard on the dollars, look into PowerPCB by Pads. Their
Schematic Capture tool is lacking however. PowerPCB and PowerBGA, will
accommodate just about any design situation. They are extremely
straightforward and easy to use...a no brainer. You don't even have to go
to training if you have a basic understanding of layout tools. No one wants
to spend time reading the help contents!
PowerPCB also has and excellent DXF and OLE import/export. PowerPCB allows
the flexibility to also cut and paste your design into just about any
document package.
Extremely flexible library and editing on the fly.
This is a true WYSIWYG. Even has it's own internal CAM plot pre-viewer.
Happy hunting!
Steve Rose
PCB Design Engineer
Corning Incorporated
SP-DV-01-MOD 1 #8
Corning NY 14831
Phone: 607 974-1791
Fax: 607 974-1844
Email: [log in to unmask]
> ----------
> From: <[log in to unmask]>[SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> Reply To: DesignerCouncil E-Mail Forum.;[log in to unmask]
> Sent: Friday, January 29, 1999 2:47 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [DC] Opinions needed on CAD software
>
> Hi Brian
>
> My name is Jim Schey and I work at Rockwell Automation - Allen Bradley.
> Here we have at least one of every cad package offered in the past 10
> years. The list is dwindling and currently the three most popular is
> Incases, Pads, and Mentor. After four years of trying to make Mentor a
> preferred tool this idea died a slow death. Some of the groups that went
> with the mentor tools found themselves with less functionality than they
> had prior to converting, very large maintenance bills and major bugs that
> to this day are not fixed. Some had migrated over to Pads which was PC
> based which a lot of engineering groups preferred over Unix. After two
> years of evaluation we keep coming back to Incases, Theda 6.0. It
> satisfies our needs with the functionality we once had and the price is
> affordable, support is great and it interfaces to all of our other
> packages
> we use. We are currently evaluating a product called Elixir from Incases
> to manage our libraries for schematic, pcb, simulation and component
> engineering. We can really have a global library so that the Pads users
> can pull down a part configured for Pads or for Mentor. We found that if
> we build the part in Theda 6.0 we can generate a library part for mentor
> and pads. We cannot load a mentor library and build a Theda part, it is
> missing too much information. Pads is a nice package and is sufficient
> for
> some of our divisions but Theda runs on NT or UNIX and data bases are very
> portable. One of our divisions uses Zuken and the have had success with
> the tool set but have had some missing functionality that again we have
> already in Incases tools. Again this is just a quick overview of what we
> have and what we have done in the last 2 years and where we are headed.
> We
> could get together off line and get into detail if you would desire.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Brian Baltus <[log in to unmask]> on 01/29/99 11:11:41 AM
>
> Please respond to "DesignerCouncil E-Mail Forum."
> <[log in to unmask]>; Please respond to
> [log in to unmask]
>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> cc: (bcc: James E Schey/Cleveland/RA/Rockwell)
> Subject: [DC] Opinions needed on CAD software
>
>
>
>
> Hello everyone!
>
>
> Well its the new year and after seven years of the same design
> software we are finally getting a chance to check out new software.
> Of course just like the rest of you, who has that kind of time! So
> I'm going to throw a list of packages at ya that we're looking at and
> see if we can get a little help from the world wide Designer network.
> OK here we go, listed below are the packages we have in mind, if you
> use one of these could you take a minute and jot something down.
> Remember it's nice to know about the good things as well as the bad.
>
>
>
> OrCAD, Inc
> Software: OrCAD Capture CIS (Release 9)
> OrCAD Layout Plus (Release 9)
>
> Zuken-Redac Inc.
> Software: Cadstar
>
> VeriBest, Inc.
> Software: Ascent L2
>
> Company: Cadence
> Software: Allegro Studio
>
> ACCEL Technologies, Inc
> Software: Accel EDA
>
> PADS Software, Inc.
> Software: PADS Power PCB
>
> Mentor Graphics Corporation
> Software: Board Station
>
>
> Hopefully this will help other designers also if their in the middle
> of making a decision.
>
>
>
> Thanks to everyone in
> advance!
>
> Brian J. Baltus
> Best Power, Inc
> 608-565-5118
>
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