Does anyone else use the Altium flex PCB feature that they introduced in back Altium 14? I've been using it regularly for the past year and a half for flex/rigid-flex boards and it has to be one of the most frustrating things I've ever had to deal with
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As far as I can tell, they *still* haven't fixed most of the outstanding bugs since the feature launched. Coverlays disappear, vias randomly become untented, gerber outputs don't generate properly (and this isn't even deteriministic, so sometimes your gerbers from the exact same .PcbDoc look right and other times they break). Oh, and my favourite - if you edit your board outline even slightly, all your flex/rigid-flex defined regions and all your bends disappear. It's a pretty awful workflow. And don't even try calling support, they haven't used it.
I suspect this is because they did their Shanghai -> California move right after they introduced the feature so none of the programmers stayed with the company. However, Altium is still advertising the feature as the greatest thing since sliced bread despite the fact that they aren't willing to do any fixes to it (just check their changelog if you don't believe me). I sent a big list of bugs off to an applications engineer at Altium - didn't even get an acknowledgement back.
I'm a little annoyed that my employer has to pay maintenance on something that Altium clearly has no intention of fixing. Altium has also been pushing SolidWorks integration hard, yet their SolidWorks plugin doesn't integrate with the flex circuits feature. Well, what's the point in that, then?
I am curious as to how well Cadence does flex circuits, since apparently OrCAD and Allegro have this feature now - any Cadence users want to chime in?