How best to export planar microwave filters from Microwave Office into Altium?

I've designed a number of planar microwave filters (6 to 18GHz) in MWO and now need to get them into Altium so that I can lay them out as part of a larger circuit.

Altium have a method for importing Gerbers and converting them to *.PCB files (they refer to this as reverse engineering) but neither myself nor the Altium tech support guy could make the procedure work. One method that does work is to import a DXF file from MWO, convert it to polygons, copper pour into the polygons and then manually place all the vias again but I'm really looking for a much better design flow than this; something that is largely automatic and less error prone would be good:smile:

As far as I can see, the available output formats from MWO are Gerber, DXF, GDSII and possibly PADS *.ASC. Can anyone suggest a clean method for doing this import/export or a conversion utility that will take one of these formats and convert it into an Altium *.PCB file?

Many thanks

OldRFguy

There is an import wizard that comes with Altium. Have you tried the Pads ASCII import??

Thanks for this suggestion, yes I have tried exporting PADS files from Microwave Office and certainly the latest editions of MWO do not generate a version of the PADS file that can be read by Altium; it may be that the standard for the PADS files has been upgraded and that MWO is out of step. I've tried running the PADS files from MWO through a PADS viewer and it cant read them either.