Printed Circuit Board software

do you need to do designs with dense wiring, 3, 4, 5 or more levels with high speed data?

High speed data has far more complex routing rules to avoid cross talk on the traces. cross talk can be interpreted as a signal by the line that picks it up.

Old simple boards do not have these problems.

old programs might fail to properly route as they do not have the right rules. Another thing, a 6 level board with 10,000 parts is not an easy computational task and it gets even more so with cross talk rules to follow which can mean hundreds of extra isolation traces, so the newest ones are needed for the fastest, multi level boards.

The learning curve. Some new programs can take a man 3 months to master to a highly productive state where he knows all the libraries, macros,key shortcuts etc etc.

That man has to be taken off other tasks and tasked with studying this new program for 6 hours a day until he has mastered it. It is no good to be a dilletante and take a week to lay out a new board when a man who has learned it can do it in a day or less.

Thank you.

Our boards are relatively simple 2-4 layers, digital (~100MHz), analog (<100KHz), and power. Chips are PLCC and DIP with more than 0.5mm spacing. We are producing industrial boards that will operate in a noisy environment (power converters > 100KW).

We do one or two boards at a time and may not do any for many months afterward. We have never become "expert" in the PCB cad.

I am looking for a user friendly package without too many heavy features as FPGA programming unless they do not interfere with the basic operations... I don't want to spend two weeks setting up a board before routing it.

This one is free with schematic capture also:http://www.sunstone.com/pcb123.aspx

Maveric,

Thank you.

It looks interesting but aren't we stuck with their PCB manufacturer and Digikey?

Can we use other suppliers?

It depends entirely on what type of boards you are producing.
The stuff I do is often simple single sided through hole component stuff, or double sided, and the odd couple simple surface mount board.
I find the auto route functions generally need so much tidying up after them that it's quicker to do it manually.
So I just use a cheapo system which is now obsolete anyway.
I don't really see any reason for you to change, as long as the old system will produce the gerber files and you have a master CD or whatever in case you need to re-install.
$3-4k seems a lot, but like I said, it depends entirely what you are making!
The project management functions sound like a red herring to me. How hard is it to project manage a 'few boards a year' ?
Sorry I'm sounding like a grumpy ludite...hey, maybe it's 'cos I'm a cat.
Del

Thank you Del,

See my post #4 for details of what we do.

I agree with your philosophy. This is why we hadn't upgrades for so many years. Once you master the weaknesses of a software, why changing to a different set of weaknesses?

The problem is that at one point, it is too obsolete and becomes tedious to operate.

I hope that over the years, the CAD company have improved ther packages to make easier to produce completed PCB.

We typically spend ~three weeks routing a board. Would it be faster with today's packages?

I can see you need some decent kit for that stuff. I'm a bit of a one man band, all very 'state of the Ark' (my longbow is considered high tech where I work)

Del

If your data is not very high speed, modern PCB programs can autoroute a lot faster than those 5-6 years old. This is partly due to faster CPUs but they have also evolve faster testing algorithms with more parallelism. Get a trial and have one run it on a past project you have already routed. Most you can do with a parts list and schematic diagram according to a set of rules. You can work up to the auroparts listing and autopurchase amd quote price stuff later.

Marcot,

We purchased a few seats of the Altium Designer (AD) software when they were offering a promotional price of $2000 (upgrade pricing, we were upgrading some of our old PCAD seats). If you can get them to upgrade some of your Orcad tools for that price, I would have to say you would be getting your money's worth. I can't say I've used AD very much, but from what I have done with it, I can say it's a pretty powerful PCB design tool. I don't know that I would describe their user interface as very "user friendly", but with time I'm sure it will become framiliar. AD is a resource hog, so to speak, so make sure your hardware is up to the task. I would look at their minimum required hardware, and make sure your stuff is better than that. I'm sure your experience with AD would not be good if your hardware is close to their minimum. Good luck with your decision, hopefully my limited input has helped.

Tom

Thank you.