Great comments Phil... :) 

Ease of use is a good one. It's really a broad overall 'feel' statement... I would probably rate them on a scale of 1 to 10 if I was going to do it. But I feel it would be more useful to break it down into more categories. 

Personally I have used quite a few cad tools, Altium being the most current. 
Just a little disclaimer before I state my opinions... opinions are like noses... everyone has one... mine is no more significant than anyone else's... I have no axe to grind with anyone, or any agenda... I intend no harm to anyone or any company... I'm just interested in evaluating the CAD company's products from the standpoint of a designer... This would be useful to me in choosing where I should be spending cad tool dollars wisely. I want the most bang for the buck when it comes to my cad tools, and I want them to be easy to use. I don't want the tool to limit me when I need to design a feature into the board, and I want it to cut down on the drudge tasks and help me be productive and efficient. I want it to help me not hinder me, and I don't want the cost to be so high that I can't justify using and keeping the tool upgraded. Of course the continuing 'cost to own and maintain' issue is important too. 


Altium...
I like it generally for the most part... it does about 90% of what I need to do to get my designs completed and checked and I love the 3D capability. That feature rocks. I am getting pretty good at making 3D parts using Solidworks to add the step files to our footprints. There is nothing that compares with being able to see if the parts are going to fit in 3D and being able to export it to Solidworks so our mechanical engineers can easily get an accurate model of the assembly and use it in their thermal analysis, vibration analysis, and general mechanical model fit checks, plus the assembly drawings are awesome. I think this ability is the most significant improvement that any cad company has done to PCB design tools in the last twenty years. Having a large library of pre-setup footprints with the 3D models already in them is marvelous. :) Creating library parts is not a difficult task either... I like it. That being said.. it could use some improvements too... The autorouter is not much more than a toy... not real useful to most of us, good for a quick and dirty board where you really don't care a lot about the routes... fewer and fewer boards can be routed with that sort of a tool. We route all our boards by hand... and the autorouter would have to be much more intelligent to be useful to us. The hand routing tools are pretty good, equivalent to Mentor Expedition's interactive routing in a lot of ways... I use them all the time and they work pretty good with the design rules... most of them. 
The company has become more responsive to user issues over the years, their new online customer feed back system seems to be working okay, I have some issues with it, but if I really want to get to someone to get help with an issue I can. They are a nice bunch and the user group is awesome. 
The software is priced right and affordable to smaller companies and I hear their customer base is really growing. Smart move. :)  



Mentor... 
 Expedition was better than Board Station, (Board Station was a pain to use according to the 8 or so Board station users I HAVE met)... but they made it work with a lot of effort and setup... and time... some very exceptionally talented designers spent many years of their careers getting good at Mentor Board Station only to have to retrain themselves to get a job later because there were so few companies who used it in the area. I remember when Mentor first came out with Board Station... it was still in beta testing when I was working at a company in Oregon 25 years ago... Mentors reps borrowed a few of us from the company I was at to evaluate their PCB  software at their facility in Beaverton, OR. (I was using Intergraph at the time) We compared it to Intergraph's PCB Design tool at the time and it wasn't bad... but Intergraph's program wasn't particularly user friendly either...  just saying.. 

Several of my students in my PCB design class back a few years ago were former Mentor Board Station users who were out of a job and looking to learn Mentor Expedition to get another position. They didn't love the old program much... and liked Expedition much better but it was still hard to use and dependent on many things being absolute right and done in a specific sequence and wouldn't let you do things 'on the fly' like some software does. It was very restrictive and structured and required a lot of planning ahead by the designers to be successful. Library creation was arduous, fraught with ways to create problems by the inexperienced users... it wasn't an easy tool to teach PCB design with, too much overhead and training required on the tool to get to the PCB design part of the class... The router that Mentor bought by acquiring Veribest (Cadnetix) was the best router on the market. It was very smart... This was a great move by Mentor... and sad for the rest of us who couldn't afford it though... Mentor is a big company and is really only an option for the 'deep pocket' companies that can afford it... so I have not used it to do my work since it was part of the Cadnetix platform.   

PADS PCB... 
 Used it... didn't like it much but I used it... kind of reminded me of 'reverse polish' calculators... good if you got the concept... painful if you didn't... I was an old Tango user and transitioned to PADS thinking its widely used it can't be all that tough... boy was I wrong. I cussed a lot daily trying to get a first board out and the software 'work-arounds' were endless... and I got the 'oh you want to do that? You need to buy this other 2k add on that does that'... and if you want to make it do this, well we have this other add on to purchase that does that... etc...  we used the  car salesman analogy to describe the way they marketed it to us... ' oh u want tires? Well that will cost you, and a steering wheel, a radio, seat belts? Oh yea... that's extra...' you get my drift. :)
 


Cadence...
 I only used Specctra for a short while when I was taking a training class and was not too impressed with the user interface much... their router was very good if you could figure out how to make the 'do' files which some designers were very good at. The Schematic package was not impressive to use but it was functional. I didn't mess with the library much... Someone with extensive Cadence experience would be more useful in giving their take on it. Their high end tools I have no experience with... someone else will have to comment on that. I have seen good things about them written in PCB Mag... and they did will in the benchmarks... I have seen the Schematic editor years ago though and it wasn't too impressive from a graphics point of view... I think Orcad looked better. 


Orcad... 
Was a standard for a lot of us... affordable, kind of clunky but useable, it has evolved some... I would say Altium's schematic package is about the same as Orcad's. It is functional, and could be better but it gets the job done. I have not seen any significant improvements in schematic development packages really from a ease of use standpoint since Orcad...  they are all about the same to use though some have more powerful things they can do with the schematics after you create them.  The PCB program sucked... had lots of bugs and issues with it, and I hear it has improved a lot... My brother actually kind of liked it for awhile... then he tried Altium and bought that.  He's currently using Altium. I think Orcad is not ever going to be Cadence's main schematic or PCB offering but serves as a way to get into the lower end CAD market and hopefully steer their customers on a path to upgrade to the more powerful and understandably more expensive software as they can afford to do so... Allegro...  



Zuken... 
I used Cadstar many, many years ago and my experience would probably not be relevant to the current product... It was not exactly user friendly... 

Some folks really like EAGLE I hear... I have no experience with it. Not qualified to comment there... 




Well I have dropped a few opinions out there... I'm interested to see what others have experienced and their peeves and raves with PCB cad software... 
:) c'mon, don't be shy... :)


 
Bill Brooks | Datron World Communications, Inc.
PCB Designer/Engineer | Office: 760-602-7004| Fax: 760-597-3777 | [log in to unmask]
3055 Enterprise Court, Vista, CA 92081 | www.dtwc.com

Performance You Require. Value You ExpectTM

-----Original Message-----
From: DesignerCouncil [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of DUTTON, Phil
Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2012 5:35 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [DC] CAD tool Benchmarks?

Sure does Andy!

That can be as bad as discussing religion or politics...

Personally I find ease of use very important. I don't want to be pushing along a CAD tool when I want to be designing boards.
Customer service with respect to bug fixes and updates and listening to feedback from designers.
Good, user defined, DFM checking tools are important.
I find the ability to export and import 3D models very useful, allowing me to interact with the mechanical CAD guys.
Library parts should be easily created 'on-the-fly' from within the same user interface.
Ease of visualisation and 'cross-probing' between the pcb and schematics is important.
You should be able to use it in a simple manner to do the quick and simple jobs as well as be able to expand on it's capabilities for those that are more complex if needed.
Flexibility is therefore important.
Forget autorouters except for array breakouts. I've never seen them work nicely since everything was in through-hole DIP packages. Interactive manual routing with some automation with respect to differential pairs and buss routing is much more useful.
(btw.. I really like Altium...)

regards, 
Phil.

 
Phil Dutton C.I.D.+



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