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Opinion wanted: Should I buy Altium Designer ?

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Rocketmagnet

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buy altium designer

Hi all,

I am seriously considering buying Altium Designer to design PCBs at my company. Before we splash out a lot of money, I would like to know how other people feel about this package.

We will mostly be designing PIC and ARM microcontroller, motor driver and sensor networks. Highest speeds would be the 100MHz EtherCAT bus.

The boards will be used in robotics applications (www.shadowrobot.com). In particular I am very keen on the 3D ability to check that my design fits inside its housing. In our industry, space is extremely tight, so this is essential to us.

I would love to hear from anyone who uses Altium regularly. Do you enjoy using it? Does it get the job done? Would you rather be using something else?

Many thanks

Hugo Elias
 

buy altium

it depends on what s/w you have already in place . Like here we had Protel so moving to altium was good for us. I love to work with altium ,it has all the recent feature like Signal integrity , 3D modeling as u mentioned. Almost all the major companies has that .
 

altium signal integrity

Thanks dipnirvana,

Currently, we are using Gschem and Pcb from the gEDA toolsuite. They are Open Source Linux packages. They are fairly basic, with very few features.

All I want to know is that I won´t regret it.

Many thanks
 

altium expedition

we bought altium 2 year ago (then for the top price, price has drop alot now).
NEVER had any regrets. it is SOOOO quick to work with (schematic snippets are great, and very quick and easy routing).

joost
 

altium designer signal integrity 2009

Thanks vaneenbergen,

That's good to hear. I wonder if anyone has used any other packages and can compare them?

thanks
 

cadstar vs. altium

Hello
I have used following tools:
- Altium Designer
- Mentor Graphics DxDesigner and Expedition
- Zuken Cadstar

In my oponion Cadstar is quite good but I prefer Altium because in my opinion featerues related with setting rules, drawing etc are better and more advanced. Weak point of Altium is Signal Integrity tool.If you want design high speed circuits you have to consider alternative tools or software. The last in my opinion is DxDesigner with Expedition. In my opinion these software is very poor. The same feautures in Cadstar and Altium are easy to use and they work ok but in Dx they work poor. Additional minus for Mentor related with documentation.

Link to signal integrity simulators.



Best regards
 

altium designer price

hi,

I am using EDWinXP and it can help to produce Board Cabinet Views in 3D

regards

josabraham
 

altium designer requirements 2009

Thanks obinobi and josabraham,

That's very helpful. Altium does sound pretty good then, since we won't be doing much high speed stuff, but really need the rules and 3D.

Hugo
 

high-speed rules altium

I would suggest Cadence allegro 16.x XL version,since it can handle high speed constraints very easily and quickly without manual checks.
Regards,
Satya

Added after 1 minutes:

I would suuest Cadence allegro 16.x XL version,since it can handle high speed constraints very easily.
Regards,
Satya
 

i guess you don't know what you are writing about,

Cadstar, Expedition - these are TOP tools, very expensive and powerfull, suitable when there are tight packaging requirements, a lot of signal/mechanical constrains and when time really plays a role

BR,
 

I know what I'm writing about :D

I too would recommend Cadstar.

You can even buy the basic Cadstar to do the layouts and rent the rest when it comes to the SI or HS designs.
 

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