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?
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 .
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).
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.
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