Bob, First,
the most important to know about schematic cads as well as pcb cads, are how to implement a set of "best practice" while working with the system ( KICad ). KiCad is good by letting you - without the need for tweaks and workarounds, adhere to good working practice while cad'ing your designs. The biiig difference between pcb cads are the supporting applications, especially for high speed ( emc prone ) designs as well as RF designs. In KiCad, you have to switch on your own brain to do any Maxwell simulations etc. At the end of the day, it all comes down to the price tag. CAD softwares are low volume products with heavy maintenance. This have to be paid by someone - the customer. A good software can easily cost 25,000$ per head and year in maintenance/upgrades. But be reminded, they are probably not making a lot of profit on the software sale! The profit comes mostly from training! Training to be able to follow best design practice.... KiCad is good for 90% or more of both analog/digital and RF designs. These with special requirements on RF designs, they have to more or less do manual designs anyway - and KiCad will do nicely here too. I wouldn't use KiCad for the design of a 5000 Dual Core AMD 64 motherboard... But even the thought of that is slightly daft. I have so far not been hindered in my Hamradio designs when using KiCad so this have to be named my primary choice. I'm not locked in to Windows - I use Linux and if you add QUCS to your design suite, you can go very very far before running out of tools. It would of course be nice with backward annotation and a good simulator interface but I still prefer the main development efforts to focus on the standard cad features... //Dan, M0DFI > > On Nov 12, 2007 7:01 AM, rtnmi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Can someone tell me how Kicad compares to commercial software for the > > same purpose of Electronic Design. > > > > My son is working toward his degree and I wanted him to use Kicad if it > > will help him with software that is industry standard. > > > > I am using it for my hobby of Ham Radio. > > > > tnx Bob
