pucho812 said:
With people I've talked to who are gear manufactures, they seem to use altium designer over other software. Is it really that much more advanced or that much better? Is there a reason a license is over 7000.00 dollars u.s.?
We use Altium at the day job.
It easily handles the multilayer boards (the most layers we've done is 14) we do. It handles odd board shapes and even flex circuits. Plane pours are easy. We don't use their "Vaults," we use a company-standard Integrated Library managed by the layout guy, and library management is "easy" compared to other systems. Forward and back annotation works (you can renumber parts on the layout and back annotate that into the schematic). You can set all sorts of layout rules, such as differential pair spacing and lengths and it will tune line lengths for you. (We don't autoroute but the length tuning to match all of the traces in a memory bus is very handy.)
We do a lot of BGAs and it handles them well. Every design has at least one FPGA, and when you do them there's a lot of back and forth between the layout and the schematic as you swap pins for best routing and that works well. (We do FPGA pin-swapping manually, since the rules for pin swaps vary with FPGA family and they're sometimes not obvious.)
BOM export works well, as does fab data (Gerber) output. Oh, yeah, it handles 3D models for components, which is absolutely necessary when you need to fit the board into an enclosure. (The mechanical folks take the 3D board data and import it into SolidWorks.) If you have IBIS models of your parts you can do signal-integrity simulations of your layout.
On the downsides, it has a really terrible FPGA design environment which nobody uses and Altium pissed away man-years of development effort trying to implement. It also offers the Tasking 8051 compiler which nobody uses. But you pay for both of those "features." You'll go nuts trying to sort out the "vaults" and the license management.
Really, in the EDA world, it hits a sweet spot for companies which do a lot of boards that are reasonably complex but not off-the-charts like a PC motherboard. PADS is more money (it's Mentor's "entry level" system now) and is basically Altium's only real competitor. Is OrCAD even still an option? There is nothing less expensive which can be considered professional. We would slit our throats trying to do our boards in EAGLE (awful user interface, dismal library management, can't handle the complexity). Kicad is fine for hobbyists (like the average GroupDIY-er) but is so not ready for prime time professional use.
On the Altium forum and elsewhere, folks have been asking for a reduced-cost version, perhaps with limits on the number of routing layers and board size and maybe number of parts. Altium management doesn't seem interested. A $2500 version which supported eight copper layers and VME-sized boards would sell like gangbusters.
-a
