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???
04/12/11 17:22
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#181828 - Altium
Responding to: ???'s previous message
Aubrey Kagan said:
Overall, what is your opinion of Altium? We are running PCAD 2001 (so almost anything will be an improvement) and are in the market for a new product, Altium being the obvious upgrade path. We had a sales meeting with them and everything looks so good, but I remember PCAD never meeting its promised potential.


The core PCB layout program is mostly solid. As I noted, they broke their differential routing feature in AD10 (grab one signal, the pair moves and can be tuned). I get weird crashes occasionally with 9, haven't had any so far in 10.

Library features are pretty good, once you understand what it's all about (footprint libraries vs symbol libraries vs integrated libraries.) The 3D modeling built in is great, as is the signal-integrity simulation feature (which takes a lot of work to set up).

Their support is utterly dismal. Their web forums are a mess: everything, PCB, schematic, FPGA, FPGA board, microcontroller, everything is dumped into one large forum. Some of the regulars on the forum seem to like that inanity. Go figure.

They really want to move licensing and such to the cloud, which is a disaster because you can't depend on having an active network connection at all times.

And yeah, they really are pushing their vault and "team design" stuff as well as the FPGA and micro cruft, none of which are interesting to us, and it looks like the core layout tool isn't as interesting to them.

Why Altium thought that rolling up a microcontroller compiler and FPGA tools into a PCB layout tool made sense is beyond me. They tried to charge 13 large for all of that, and they didn't want to go with an a-la carte pricing, and they were shocked, SHOCKED to discover that nobody was upgrading.

I did press them about the China thing, and was told that the Australian folk are being transplanted to Shanghai and that support presently comes from and will continue to come from the US (I am in Canada). Other rumours suggest that 60% of the Sydney office has been let go. http://www.embeddedrelated.com/usenet/em...6560-1.php


I suppose it remains to be seen how many of the Australians return home after a year of training their replacements.

At the risk of hijacking the thread, does anyone have opinions of other schematic capture/PCB packages. I know Cadence promises Allegra/Orcad will read PCAD files and libraries. I have seen Eagle treated with disdain in this forum.


EAGLE is a toy.
A group for whom I did a contracting job uses PADS and they like it.

I would not even try to migrate libraries and designs from one tool to another. Maintain a machine with the old software so you can access the designs.

-a

List of 13 messages in thread
TopicAuthorDate
Only Altium could go to China            01/01/70 00:00      
   Only Altium?            01/01/70 00:00      
      Only ..            01/01/70 00:00      
         Ah...            01/01/70 00:00      
         Opinion of Altium            01/01/70 00:00      
            Altium            01/01/70 00:00      
               Consider virtual machines for keeping older software online            01/01/70 00:00      
                  virtual machines            01/01/70 00:00      
                     Depends            01/01/70 00:00      
                        re: depends.            01/01/70 00:00      
                           Huge problems            01/01/70 00:00      
               Not only for PCAD            01/01/70 00:00      
                  You're right about the rust ...            01/01/70 00:00      

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