Jim, We too are living with the slow and painful death known as Mentor. Your message rang loud and clear with us too. We are about done with paying high maintenance fees and receiving nothing in return. I have recently talked to Intercept, Cadence and Veribest. My question is, as a Mentor "user" (aka - someone who is forced to use it) have you looked at Intercept's Pantheon? I find it attractive due to the direct portability from Mentor! Please let me know what your thoughts are.... Art Rambo Team Leader - PCB Design/TAP Products Westell, Inc 750 N Commons Dr Aurora, Il 60504 (630)375-4346 - voice (630)898-5290 - fax [log in to unmask] "<James Schey>" <[log in to unmask]> on 01/29/99 01:47:38 PM 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: Art Rambo/Westell/EIT) 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 ################################################################ DesignerCouncil E-Mail Forum provided as a free service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8c ################################################################ To subscribe/unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in the body: To subscribe: SUBSCRIBE DesignerCouncil <your full name> To unsubscribe: SIGNOFF DesignerCouncil ################################################################ Please visit IPC's web site (http://www.ipc.org) "On-Line Services" section for additional information. 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For technical support contact Hugo Scaramuzza at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.312 ################################################################ ################################################################ DesignerCouncil E-Mail Forum provided as a free service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8c ################################################################ To subscribe/unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in the body: To subscribe: SUBSCRIBE DesignerCouncil <your full name> To unsubscribe: SIGNOFF DesignerCouncil ################################################################ Please visit IPC's web site (http://www.ipc.org) "On-Line Services" section for additional information. For technical support contact Hugo Scaramuzza at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.312 ################################################################