> > I am evaluating the products Protel 99 SE and PCAD for our EDA s/w. I
woud
> > appreciate if you could share with me your experience of using Protel 99
<snip>
> > Any comparison of Protel and PCAD also would be appreciated.
> >
> > I would appreciate your help. Please feel free to give me a call.
> >
> > Aslam Sherule
> We have both (PCAD came from our closed California office), and they
> complement each other. Protel for small to medium jobs and PCAD for large
> jobs. I have not used the PCAD enough to comment much on it, but my boss
<snip>
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
<snip>
> PCAD is somewhat better but cumbersome. The last version of PCAD I used
was
> 14, a simple feature like "loop removal" , standard features found in PADS
> and Protel was a $4.5K option, get real! Compare...import a netlist on
> the fly on PCAD, or have a nightmare importing a netlist in PADS. I have
> seen more designs hosed up with PADS netlist import/ export / compare/
eco,
> its a joke. Seriously compare, but don't make a statement "Protel is good
> for small boards" I take it seriously them are fightin words
>
> Please feel free to call me or email me if you want my real opinion
>
> Mike Reagan
In a reasonably recent posting to this forum (albiet at the end of a lengthy
posting), I also requested those with experience in using both Protel 99 SE
and PCAD (2001) to give their impressions of how these compare.
At least I have now seen some feedback on this matter, even though this was
in response to someone else asking a similar question. (I'm not knocking
correspondents answering the questions of newcomers, but I have given a lot
of my time answering numerous questions asked by many users on this forum.
But in this case, given that I asked my question at the end of a long
posting, which was predominately about another matter, perhaps this was
missed by at least some correspondents.)
I mentioned it in that previous posting, but I consider that it is worthy of
repetition in this posting as well. After the end of next month, the cost of
a (new/from scratch) Protel 99 SE license will be US$7,995 (up from the
present US$5,995), whereas the present corresponding price for PCAD 2001 is
US$9,995. As such, the difference in price between Protel and PCAD (which is
now also owned by Protel) is shrinking.
PCAD does provide some features not provided by Protel, such as being able
to add layers as required (as long as the total number of layers does not
exceed 999), and providing a more sophisticated padstacks feature. I don't
know about PCAD 2001, but earlier versions of PCAD (i.e. DOS versions, in an
era prior to Protel owning it) supported text strings being either
left-justified, center-justified, or right-justified (and also supported
text strings being either bottom-justified, center-justified, or
top-justified). I don't know if it has something similar to Protel's SDK
feature (it didn't in DOS versions), but its macro feature is not as
handicapped as Protel's.
Traditionally, PCAD has been more "up-market" than Protel, but recent
developments suggest that Protel could be aspiring to merge these
applications and/or move Protel "up-market". (All other things being equal,
"up-marketing" a product normally shrinks the size of its potential market,
but it is reasonable to assume that Protel has at least contemplated this
consideration.) As such, I consider that comparisons between Protel and PCAD
could (and even should) be of interest to many current users of Protel.
I could provide some details of my experiences with using AD2.0, a DOS (and
capability-limited) version of PCAD released in the early 1990s. But given
that PCAD is now a Windows product, some aspects of my experiences would
inevitably be out-of-date. Over the years, Protel has acquired assorted new
features, but there still are times when I think that it would be nice if
Protel provided assorted features which were provided with that version of
PCAD.
All things said and done though, I am glad that I am using Protel 99 SE
rather than PCAD AD2.0. But I am still curious as to what PCAD 2001 is like
to use...
Regards,
Geoff Harland.
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