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Recommendations for stand-alone electronic design software?

specfab

Titanium
Joined
May 28, 2005
Location
AZ
We are looking to see what's out there for stand-alone electronic design software, capable of both schematic design and board layout. Ideally it has output that can be furnished to a PCB house for board manufacturing, and a file storage caoability based in the local computer, not cloud-based. I'm interested in whether you have suggestions and/or experiences.

I do have Fusion 360 which now incorporates Eagle, but I want to see what other options there may be which would let this be a more independent capability.
 
Altium Designer is the best I've used and is my daily driver. Push them to sell you a license for around $5k.

I've used lots of different packages and can tell you if you do this stuff with any frequency it will save you money.
 
Altium is the ultimate schematic and layout tool. Not impressive on the simulation side, though. Mentor Graphics is also good. Their "system vision" simulation is good. Eagle might be good for a lot of stuff, smaller designs, one offs etc.
 
When I was doing this stuff, I used Eagle which suited my budget at the time. I think it may have changed ownership once or twice since I last bought a license. Perfectly competent for both schematics and PCB layout, but no one would confuse it with a $25,000/seat SW package.
 
I also use Altium almost daily.

I originally came from the Mentor camp.
Have a look at their PADS suite.
Have the vendors make demos for you..

Price wise, I think Altium is very hard to beat, but has its quirks..

Dont forget, there is a learning curve in any tool..

Of course, if you only do 3-5 boards a year, I would recommend to outsource them..
 
For our most complex, high-speed boards we use Altium. For most other we use Diptrace....quite capable and very reasonably priced.

Fred
 
I use Circuit Studio by Altium. It's available from Element14 and other sources for $495 one time fee, heck I just almost spent that much for a couple dial gauges. It doesn't have all the features of the full blown Altium, but it is very capable with 32 signal layers and 16 planes, unlimited board size, plus more. I see now that they have a number of "how to" videos online , when I started the "how to" videos were almost non existent. I do very few board designs in a year (3 tops) and they range from 1 to 4 layers and the biggest size was 6 x 8 inches. I have never had a problem with a PCB house not accepting or having questions about the files submitted to them.

Best of all, Autodesk doesn't get a penny out of me!:D
 
How complex are your boards? I do mostly 2 layer boards and ExpressPCB (free) works fine for it. I order my boards through them but they can supply a Gerber file if you want to send it elsewhere.
It does not do automatic trace laying (where you put down a part and it connects it to your other parts from the schematic) but I have no problem doing that. It does show where a pin connects to on other parts.
You can get boards with solder mask and part outlines or just etched boards. They do not do cutouts or slots.
They have a library of parts for schematics and you can build your own.
 
Curious that noone mentioned Orcad.
Though I have not been involved with schematic capture and PCB stuff in nearly 20 years, back then it was very capable and had one of the slickest UI I've ever seen in a DOS
based program.
I do believe they have a free demo available, and at least one time they've had Orcad Express, which was free with limited components or traces...
 
I own diptrace unlimited. No doubt altium is superior, and they are/were running a sale here lately. However, until you are doing quite advanced boards I doubt you'll appreciate the difference. It'll be down to differences in libraries, bom management, automatic routing, automatic trace length matching, and built in impedance calculations. In diptrace you have to hand calculate impedance. Overall it works well for me.

I totally do not get the reason fusion360 is integrating eagle, it makes little sense in my mind. For one thing, eagle isn't exactly intuitive like diptrace is. Also, there are too many little features a pcb program needs to be productive. Another thing, there are too many stellar options out there that aren't subscription.
 
I am not the best at electronic design but I know a good professional that know everything about this, so he was always using Adobe Illustrator and he was doing pretty well in my opinion. He was working at my electronics shop as a technician and he had a good salary, the best worker I could ever have. Now he is working in another country for Electronic Design Services: #1 Top Quality & Affordable!. I think it is better for him, because he will develop more. Moreover the salary is much better, so I am happy for him.
 








 
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