I just thought I'd throw you guys my 2c worth and another option.
Around 6 months ago I found myself in a position where I needed to do some
design work at home - we use Protel98 at work - so I downloaded the demo for
99SE and started to use it. Disapointingly, I came across the some of the
same "issues" that I see at work and started to look around before stumping up.
I contacted several companies including a UK company called "Tsien" (spelt like
that) and when I mentioned that I was looking at Protel, they quite literally
gave me a full copy of their system "on trial" for 6 months, no questions
asked. It has some features missing, in particular, there's no autorouter, but
it's got some features that leave others standing:
Very impressive plane and split plane control with an automatic thermal break
generation tool and a built-in plane viewing facility. Trace ploughing is
dynamic!! no repouring polygons at all.
True rotation of SMD parts by any angle - even polygon and rectangular pads get
plotted correctly in the gerber (this has been a great bugbear for me in the
past because I often design irregularly shaped boards).
Pin swapping from the PCB editor with automatic back annotation of the
schematic.
Bill of Materials export to CSV format and reverse field stuffing in parts from
excel
Via tenting control on an individual basis - really useful for those BGAs
In the (integrated) schematic tool, they've got a mechanism for getting power
connetions displayed on a part by part basis. No more hidden connections and no
more explicit power pins to be connected (Hooray). The text with the power
("global" as they call it) connections changes automatically if you the
connections.
Annotation of parts is completely under user control although the mechansim for
creating the parts in the first takes some getting your head round.
There are loads of tools that I haven't played with. In particular, I've just
had a realease from them which has a star earth return feature to allow nets to
be connected without erroneous DRC errors. Not played with it yet.
It's coming to the crunch time when my free trial license runs out and Craig
Elison's comments exactly matched what I thought at the beginning - "I could
fall in love with it and then find I can't afford it. I also would have wasted
my time evaluating the demo." I asked the Tsien people again and again about
the pricing. It is leased at 250 a year which includes all the new versions,
no capital outlay - it's pin money.
For the record, I have no personal connections with Tsien.
Kiernan Fitzpatrick
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