Missing Advanced Features in Altium

[rfbroadband]

Last time I looked at Altium was years ago...and we may consider evaluating it again.

Attached is a product matrix from Cadence including Allegro (3rd column).

I am particularly interested in advanced layout constraint management:
- delay and phase matching for high speed nets
- pin pair rules for high speed
- high speed diff pair routing, shielding
- package pin delay rules

other topics:
- RF - tracing, curve routing
- parasitic extraction (R) of traces and shapes
- hierarchical design (schematic and layout)

I do realize eventually I will have to do a detailed evaluation myself (probably Q1-23), but if an experienced user could point out a few key features that are missing for high speed and high frequency routing, I would appreciate some feedback or comments.

thanks

[thm_w]

Altium has length matching, pin package delay, via delay, hierarchical, curve routing. No real advanced RF specific features though.
You can ask them for a trial.

[nctnico]

One of the nice features of Orcad is that it can do a quick impedance and crosstalk simulation. This is super handy to do a quick check to see whether traces don't run over a split in a pour or have other impedance mismatches. The same for crosstalk; very easy to see whether traces are too close together. A couple of months ago I imported a high speed design made using Altium design into Orcad only for the purpose of doing these simulations on the design.

IMHO Altium and Orcad are pretty much on par feature wise. Orcad does allow to select options so could end up cheaper. Having used both Orcad and Altium I must say Orcad (especially the PCB part) is much much more faster compared to Altium. Snail versus cheatah. Just look at the minimum system requirements and you'll see why. Most of the more complicated system on chip (SoC) reference designs (NXP, TI, Allwinner, Rockchip, etc), are designed using Orcad.

Where it comes to the user interface, both have an equal steep learning curve. IMHO the shortcuts in Orcad's PCB layout software are easier to use. When you want to place a part or something else on a coordinate (which I do a lot; I stopped changing grid size & dragging stuff around with the mouse a long time ago), you just type x <x coordinate> <y coordinate> [enter]. In Altium you press l which brings up a pop-up in which you have to enter the coordinates and press enter twice. It just isn't as comfortable. But maybe there is a better way in Altium I'm not aware off.

[ajawamnet]

Yea - the Coupling and Impedance work flow are really nice.  I just ASCII out of Altium and import that.  The Placement and Route vision in Allegro is great too.  Still seems that a lot of things are easier in Altium - mainly PCB Footprint creation.    One thing to do is use Altium to create the footprints, place those in a PCB, then ASCII out and bring that into Allegro.  In 17.4 you can export the symbols and padstacks to a directory.  Pretty cool.  Again tho - in my book Altium has them beat as to Schematic symbol to footprint assignment, footprint creation.  For instance in Orcad to Allegro you need to match the amount of pads with the schematic symbol pins by adding an NC parameter with unused pins in a CSV string.  Altium doesn't require that.

Kinda cool how they do stacked microvia stuff in Orcad, but again you gotta declare the padstacks.  And the Padstack Browser graphics view has been broken for a while... I reported this to EMA EDA and they said it's a known issue.   In Altium it's really easy - just add a via rule and set it as a microvia. 

In Altium the ability to do custom rule queries is nice.

As to shortcuts - in Allegro you have to add things to the env file for stuff like rotate component and mirror to bottom layer.  Altium has that built in and totally customizable.  In fact, in Altium it's easy to script and add custom toolbar buttons. 

Constriant Manger is kinda cool in Cadence, but I do like having graphical directives in Altium that can drive things like class, rout geometry and rules.  Tho they have some work to do on being able to use the lists to edit it.  Parameter Manager also kinda falls short (even tho the directives are parameters - go fig)

But I do have to say, the ability to go both ways with constraints - SCH to PCB and back - is really nice

And those lists in Altium - all the editors have that - schlib, pcblib, sch and pcb that are easy to deal with and can copy paste from Excel. 

Allegro's copy layout tool blows the Altium Copy Room thing out of the water. 

Allegro's object snaps are so much better than Altium.  The right click pulldown is the way it should be done.  That inferring thing drives me nutz.  I came for the old DOS ACAD world and having a snap menu is really nice.

We've been having to go between the two tool recently and it's like each has their own strengths and weaknesses.  I was under the impression that Cadence didn't crash as much but we're seeing some silly "... program just goes away... kinda things.  That's the one thing in Altium - more so in older releases - due to the Delphi environment it sometimes crashes quite cleanly - you can still save work. 

But on the other hand - newer versions of Altium have been plagued to what appears to be memory leaks - where things just stop working, like selecting a trace.  A restart or sometimes just a close and reopen fixes it.  It's like it loses referencing to something.  And it's just random stuff.

As to Orcad - I was a DOS SDT 386 user.  Was f'ing nice for it's time - used EMM386 memory extension and was written in assembly.  Fast and Solid.  In the mid 90's they promised a Windows version and delivered 6.22 which we tried using. It used  different keyboard shortcuts and was prone to eating the DSN file to the point that Orcad couldn't open it.  It was wen they released the PCB tool - a rebranded Masstech (the company they bought - the manual I got had an ORCAD sticker over the Masstech logo) and I got a call from the fab that stated all my via drills - JUST the via drills - were off diagonally by 10 mil.  I called and asked and the tech I talked with was an old Masstech employee that complained more about the tool than I did.

It was at that point that my co founder and I started looking for a new EDA tool.  We found Protel in around 1995 and have used that since.  Back then we were doing one of the first IoT systems - see this page https://www.ajawamnet.com/amnet/index.html   and the patent it links to:  https://www.google.com/patents/US6208266 .

This was back when even our investors had no idea how significant an @ symbol would be - If you go to that amnet link you'll see where I was using it in the logo and they thought it was stoopid.  After they figured it out, they tried three takeover attempts with the final one accusing my co-founder of buying his ex stripper wife at the time, breast augmentation on the comapny AMEK.

 During a conf call with them when they told me to take the technology back (you can see me in my basement in that previous link) I told them "too late - you blew it" which they did.  Our stuff was deployed and working - some units in WTC 7 and Shea stadium (pilot from BUG/LILCO)

I told them that maybe if they asked real nice she'd let them squeeze them since they did buy them...

So I moved here to D.C. since the coders that worked for me were hacker types and these two ex-NSA guys got  their buddy got out of the Supermax prision (he'd shut down the east coast of Sprint for three days among other things) and have done over 3,000 designs with Protel/Altium since.

As to Altium - I was just talking with my sales guy (about the whole pro thing and if I can run totally off line with Standalone) and he mentioned getting an engineer on line to ask.  He then said "Your reputation proceeds you..." 'cause I guess they knew who I was.

The don't dig me there too much.  I've been kicked off the main forum before.  I just feel that they have a really nice tool an they should not muck it up by trying to justify features based on SaaS models to satisfy the investors (they are a darling of the ASX stock exchange).

With over 28 years and thousands of designs under my belt (some that were a major part of this - https://www.afsoc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/162816/benchmark-dragon-spear-program-earns-william-j-perry-award/

where I delivered a major part of that in months - way ahead of schedule and less that 20% of what they thought it would cost - I feel strongly about the tool.  And a lot of seasoned and new users on that forum feel the same way.

I really feel kinda bad that they are looking at the short term SaaS goals and not what differentiated them with stuff like ORCAD, PADS, Zuken, etc...

But I still use it - I have lots of data locked in it and it would be funky to totally switch over now.

Another thing that I like - and supposedly this might be going away - is the Standalone license file.  That Cadence dongle/License Manager thing is a bit encumbering.

I also like the fact that I can have parallel installs of Altium - I currently have over 19 different versions installed - including 99SE. 

One thing I liked was the forward compatibility - even Our Fearless Leader Dave mentioned it in a reply to one of my posts here - mentioning that it was brilliant and how when he worked there they had never broke the file system - https://www.eevblog.com/forum/altium/a365/msg3189118/#msg3189118 .

Well, in the latest versions they lost some of that. Oh well...

I have to say that in my opinion and in most regards all software companies kinda blew their wad back in the late 90's early 2000's by giving users 95% of what they needed to replace typewriters and drafting machines.  As this guy puts it in regards to Sourworks (what he calls Solidworks):



Solidworks 95 did about 90% of what 2012 did. 

I mean - it's the humans that engineer stuff. Yea I know 3D modeling FEA analysis, etc... in the current EDA and CAD tools is amazing, but like the guy that did LISAFET you better understand what's going on, because all that stuff can produce "pretty colorful pictures" that have nothing to do with reality. 

I recently had a young mechanical engineer from VA Tech - #2 in his class at what some would say is the #2 mechanical university in the U.S.  - stop over my lab/shop.  He works for one of my main clients.  He saw a microphone stand adapter I'd made...  he asks what it is.

I tell him  - "... pain in the ass to make - weird thread - 5/8-27 that I had to single point internal on my lathe... thank god I had an electronic leadscrew - made it easy to set the pitch" ...

"How do you make threads?"  he asked.

I thought he was joking. Nope they don't teach that anymore.

Now how you supposed to have these kids "Design for Manufacture" when they have no clue how it's manufactured?

Pretty sad, huh?