Moreover, too fast clicking and it crashes. while you are trying to pick the copper layer. Nice when you try to match solder mask and copper shields. Or the lack of ‘clarify selection window’. Or removing stitching via’s for no reason when I moved a polygon. Mentor Graphics (DxDesigner and PADS in my case, by the way) did some thinking and it’s very annoying. I’ve never encountered a company where I could choose my own tools. Very often thought of Eagle being much better. “Cannot short this net.” – what, I’m trying to connect a bunch of capacitors to GND?! It had glitches everywhere, even messing up or ‘making decisions’ for your design. Even worse! The copy schematic tool doesn’t even work. However, I recently had to work with Mentor Graphics. iPhone apps are simple, and they don’t use such stupid user interface design. The move, copy, group tools seem retarded. On another internship I had to use Eagle again. Awesome program and as soon you get used to it’s very productive and all makes sense (it has a learning curve, but after 2 days you’re over that). After Ultiboard I thought Eagle was fantastic (I had so much trouble with Ultiboard).Īt an internship I met Altium and I loved it. I’ve used Ultiboard, Eagle and some other free packages in the past. Posted in Roundup Tagged allegro, altium, cad, cadence, layout, pcb Post navigation doesn’t register a final judgement, but the comparison alone is worth the read. Cadence will actually move traces on other layers automatically to avoid collision with a via that is late to the party, and Altium shows some strange behavior when dragging traces. The most interesting differences show themselves once traces are all on the board and need to be rejiggered. Both have 3D rendering, with Altium’s looking a bit more pleasant but what real use is it anyway? Okay, we will admit we love a good photorealistic board rendering, but we digress.

Cadence (whose PCB layout tool is called Allegro) will display the net if you hover over the pad with your mouse. Here you can see that Altium always labels the pads so you know what net each of them belongs to. begins his overview by mentioning that the schematic editors are comparable the differences start to show themselves in the PCB layout tools. Neither are free packages so it’s good to know what you’re getting into before taking the plunge. Recently, has been working with Altium and Cadence and wrote about how they compare when it comes to PCB layout. There are a few that use Kicad, but we hear very little about other alternatives. We see a lot of projects using Eagle for the schematics and PCB layout.

Altium designer 18 ctrl_m