A New Era in PCB Design has Arrived... I don't see anything new in those videos. It seems they have again redesigned the GUI instead of improving the general usability like BOM generation, Gerber generation, Library management.
What I like about Orcad Allegro
-Schematic capture used to be superior in comparison with AD. That's until version 17.4 came out. I hope it has been repaired.
-Routing tools are and still are superior compared to many other CAD packages. (P-CAD, Altium, Pulsonix, Eagle)
-Orcad constraint manager. Amen.
-Orcad: layer management. The pre defined layer set is very extensive. I don't use all of them. But if you get a ref design or something made by an other company, it's all very consistent. This is practically non existent in Altium and the reason why some big companies don't even want to look at Altium because nothing in AD is consistent. (wait until you have to work on a board made with Altium by an other company. The layer mess awaits you.)
-Cross probing and visibility are good but lack features.
What I don't like about Orcad:
-Creating PCB components is a very time consuming adventure because you will first have to create all pad stacks. If you decide to trim one pad, you must edit the PAD stack and update the component. This has become a complete mess in my PAD stack libraries.
-You can only open one design at the time. That's very inconvenient at times.
-Library management and BOM creation. Unless you have some expensive options, library management and BOM creation is non existent. Although not perfectly implemented (the mechanical layer things) this is where Altium saves me a lot of time.
-Gerber file generation. Is there some way to save the parameters and settings? After 10 years, nothing has been done about that. Instead they started tweaking the GUI to make it look like Altium. Fools.
-Adding text to a PCB... And setting up fonts for a PCB.
What I don't like about both Altium and Orcad:
Keep out zones. The only tool doing this in a convenient way must have been P-CAD. In P-CAD you could just draw a keep out zone on any layer and that zone would be a keep out assigned to that layer. Simple and elegant. Perfect Amen.
Altium:
-Speed. Compared to any tool out there, Altium is extremely slow. You have to switch off automatic polygon pour on complex boards or the recalculation takes 2 minutes. Orcad performs the same operation on exactly the same board in the blink of an eye. I've shown this to Altium and they replied: it seems we got some work to do. That must have been five or six years ago. Nothings changed and the latest versions of Altium seem to be slower than earlier versions.
-Altium seems to save files in uncompressed and zipped. Pressing the save button it can take 5...10 or more seconds to save a very large design (enclosure step model in the design) and a message in the status bar says: compressing file... Why not do this in the background on an other temporary copy.
-The GUI structure. To much clicking around for stupid things.
-The rounding errors which piss me of every time. Especially in the DRC. What the fck.
-Any rookie can do anything in Altium. Very time consuming and error prone if you have to review a layout. In Orcad you can be very sure that a rookie has not been changing for example the PAD diameter and drill sizes in a layout because you simply can't.
-Since the latest version, you can now import and export DRC rules. Finally. Why did it take Altium I don't know how many years to realize that companies standardize on a certain set of design rules. Unfortunately its still possible for any rookie to change whatever they want. Very bad if you happen to hire some fresh out of school rookies.
Altium looks very fancy on the outside. The inside is collection of tools with a zillion features implemented in a half descent way. But they always inform they are working on that when they ask for more money.
@ asmi
AD is super-convenient as far as schematics go
-Try to make some net's in a different width. Now move some components connecting to those net's. It will turn pretty quickly into a complete mess where you have to delete and redraw parts of the schematic.
-Try to move around a block with components. The all ready connected net's outside this selected block move in the most strange ways leaving you with a mess. The only option is to delete some net's and draw them again. In Orcad they move with this block in a proper way unless there is not enough space.
Performance-wise I don't find AD particularily slow - at least I didn't noticed any significant slow-downs during layout of the board above (and it's a ten layer board), but I do remember Orcad PCB editor being MUCH faster on really complex boards - like multi-socket 16 memory channels-class server motherboards.
That must have been with the polygon's shelved I guess because I tried this in the latest version and it's still too slow unless you find waiting 2...10 seconds not a problem. Orcad repairs polygon pours in the blink of eye.
It would be super-cool if it would be possible to somehow combine Altium's schematics with Cadence Orcad/Allegdo PCB editor
I which Orcad would come standard with some descent library management and tools for output file creation.