| ??? 01/26/07 21:30 Read: times |
#131573 - cheapest? Responding to: ???'s previous message |
David Gal said:
So my personal recommendation is Altium, but that's really expensive. Altium DXP is fine but not inexpensive. Same for PCAD. Same for PADS. It's a coin toss as to which is better. I prefer PCAD. I also own a copy of Electronics Workbench Ultiboard 2001, which works well enough in spite of a couple of annoying bugs that may or may not have been fixed in later versions. (EW is now part of National Instruments.) The cheapest way there is (and I do know some engineers who do this on a regular basis with great success) is to draw (by hand/in visio/whatever) a schematic and then....hold your breath...type up a netlist in a format that the layout tool will recognize. I'm not saying that this is the modern way or the best way or the way I'd do it, but it's always a possibility and in reality, if you're careful, it's totally possible and not all that bad. 'cept if you botch it and spring for a bunch of stuffed PCBs that turn out to have errors because of the human-based translation between the hand-drawn schematic and what got put on the layout ... well, that's one definition of false economy. I guess it depends on your definition of "really expensive." PCAD is expensive. Mentor Graphics is REALLY expensive. -a |
