Author Topic: Altium Designer or Circuit studio  (Read 26607 times)

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Offline Warhawk

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Re: Altium Designer or Circuit studio
« Reply #25 on: November 18, 2016, 08:07:38 am »
Dave - is there a chance that Altium is trying to get rid of that silly Delphi SDK ? Do you know if CS/CM is still written in that thing ?

Maybe CS & CM is the first step how they port (& test) Altium designer modules into a modern programming language. Next step would be a high-end tool which would eventually completely replace AD in future.

Altium (the company) has screwed up several times but I also believe that that Deplhi SDK limits their capabilities on moving forward in right direction.

Offline Wilksey

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Re: Altium Designer or Circuit studio
« Reply #26 on: November 18, 2016, 11:57:41 am »
I think it still uses the same language.

If you open the exe with a "resource hacker", you can see if there are any resources called something like "TForm", the "T" is a tell tell sign that Borland / Embacarado or whatever they call themselves these days have their mucky fingers in the pie hole.
 

Online EEVblog

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Re: Altium Designer or Circuit studio
« Reply #27 on: November 18, 2016, 01:40:51 pm »
Dave - is there a chance that Altium is trying to get rid of that silly Delphi SDK ? Do you know if CS/CM is still written in that thing ?
Maybe CS & CM is the first step how they port (& test) Altium designer modules into a modern programming language. Next step would be a high-end tool which would eventually completely replace AD in future.
Altium (the company) has screwed up several times but I also believe that that Deplhi SDK limits their capabilities on moving forward in right direction.

No idea, sorry. I've been out of the loop for far too long.
 

Offline kashmir

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Re: Altium Designer or Circuit studio
« Reply #28 on: November 22, 2016, 02:11:43 am »
The name of the product is Atina and it's long term strategic focus is around agile engineering. It'll introduce things like 64 bit, multi-threaded services, multi-board design...We currently can't discuss much more, but we'll definitely be talking about it more soon...
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/59qyt3/my_name_is_lawrence_and_im_an/

Foolish move IMO.
They are trying to create their 4 tiered product pyramid - Free, low cost, mid level, and now high level without asking whether or not they should. It pryramid graphic looks great on the company annual report to shareholders.
What value is there to develop a new high end package and market it at presumably a much higher price than AD, and then support it?
Just make them add-ons to AD, or include in AD and own the whole damn market.
[/quote]

hi dave, i believe it is Altium's intention to offer Atina as a term-based upgrade to current Designer license holders at a lower price than those who do not have Designer, ie you can pay a bigger subscription to get all the Atina features if you already have AD
 

Offline kashmir

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Re: Altium Designer or Circuit studio
« Reply #29 on: November 22, 2016, 02:28:28 am »
hi dave, i believe it is Altium's intention to offer Atina as a term-based upgrade to current Designer license holders at a lower price than those who do not have Designer, ie you can pay a bigger subscription to get all the Atina features if you already have AD

Term-based model for team collaboration feature makes sense, but I need to pay $some-k per year just for multi-thread or 64-bit? Bugger it.
A piece of $10k software should come with built-in 64-bit and multi-thread support.

yeah i guess it might come down to what other features they use to differentiate Atina from AD. if there are enough other features to justify buying atina without making 64bit/multi thread exclusive to that product then i guess they will put 64/multi thread in AD too?
 

Offline julianhigginson

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Re: Altium Designer or Circuit studio
« Reply #30 on: November 27, 2016, 04:40:55 am »
if Atina had a lot more CST capability, I'd be really keen to pay more to subscribe to it. But not at the rate that just the PDN plugin added to base altium!  to be honest I'm not sure what features I'm missing in AD right now (vs the current super hi end options) as it's all I've ever known.

But if they leave AD in a half debugged 32 bit mess, and I'm expected to pay higher subscription to get properly written fundamental application there will be HELL to pay.. seeing as I've always pushed for subscription as long as subscription was a thing, now I'm paying it myself now that I own my own license, and I always pushed for updates when they became available before that...
 

Offline dluberger

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Re: Altium Designer or Circuit studio
« Reply #31 on: November 05, 2017, 04:24:35 pm »
In case anyone else comes across this thread in a google search as I did, I'm going to list the specific reasons why CircuitStudio isn't a viable option for me at work (though I'm considering getting it for use at home on freelance jobs).  Obviously Altium has everything I need because that's what I'm using at work now, so I'll just focus on what's missing in CS.  Keep in mind that, unlike what others have mentioned, I don't really do anything "advanced" in Altium at all.  I don't do signal integrity or anything fancy like that, my boards are typically at most 4-6 layers, I don't do chip-on-board or embedded passives.  My work is pretty lackluster! That said, here are the key things missing from CS that would make it unusable for me:

  • Specific No-ERC: I use this all the time as there are always a few things that require me to violate my own rules
  • Push while dragging: how can they not have this?? I always add single traces after-the-fact, and pushing other traces out of the way saves me the time of manually rerouting other traces
  • Rigid Flex Support: this is a definite no-go for me; I don't do fancy flex designs, usually just single layer, but I generally don't put things like through-hole metric circular connectors on-board, and will attach them with a fpc ribbon to my rigid board; the lack of rigid flex support tells me you likely can't have multiple stacks but I'm not sure; it's just scary to me that they list this as a lacking feature
  • Polygone and Plane Management: I'm not sure if this means you can't do polygons at all, but it seems CS is very light on polygon and plane support all around, so this at least concerns me.
  • Holes and vias: again, very lacking; you can't even do non-round holes, for example plated slots; I have LCDs and other devices that have rectangular tabs; pretty much any non-circular mechanicals won't be supported. Also you only can do simple vias, so you get no control over the stackup; you can, however, do blind and buried vias (which I rarely use because they're so expensive in fabrication).
  • Object classes: this is a big one; no net classes, no component classes.  This kills pretty much any moderately complex design where you need to highlight or select nets or components based on function, etc.  Also, no rooms, which is at best an inconvenience.
  • Manufacturing rules: this is another big one; no checks for hole clearance, net antennae, silk clearance, mask slivers, etc. I rely heavily on these rules.
  • True type text only: I'm pretty amazed by this.  This means no stroked fonts, which I use almost exclusively
  • Scripting: can't do it in CS. For me this is at best an inconvenience. I use one script to check for unrouted nets, but I'm sure more advanced designers use scripting a lot.
  • Component Libraries: no DB or vault access, which is another big one for me since all of my component infos are in a local SQL db for quick adding and editing; everything ties back to intlibs, but none of my schlib components have any parameters, so this would be a huge undertaking to go back to standard and intlibs only.
  • STEP files: while you can import component STEP models, you can't export STEP files, which is another killer for me because all of my boards get exported to STEP (along with components) to my mechanical engineer for solid modelling of cases, etc.
  • Output: No IPC2581; I've never quite understood the purpose of this, but my fab houses all require this, so the lack of this is another no-go for CS; also no output jobs which is at best an inconvenience because you have to manually export each thing you need for the fab house (gerbers, etc.)


So those are the big things; bottom line, CS is no good for using at work, but I would certainly consider using it at home for freelance stuff just to save money.
 

Offline ebclr

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Re: Altium Designer or Circuit studio
« Reply #32 on: November 05, 2017, 07:17:38 pm »
Diptrace can be a viable option, it's very simple, fast and cheap

www.diptrace.com
 

Offline DerekG

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Re: Altium Designer or Circuit studio
« Reply #33 on: November 05, 2017, 11:16:34 pm »
Diptrace can be a viable option, it's very simple, fast and cheap

Yes, I migrated from Altium to DipTrace some 3 years ago when DipTrace 2.4 was about. DipTrace 2.9/3.0/3.2 made all the difference & I have never looked back. Ver 3.2 now has an Altium Schematic & PCB import filter ... so now I only open Altium to check the Gerbers before sending the files to the board shop.
I also sat between Elvis & Bigfoot on the UFO.
 

Offline asmi

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Re: Altium Designer or Circuit studio
« Reply #34 on: November 14, 2017, 07:33:16 pm »
Foolish move IMO.
They are trying to create their 4 tiered product pyramid - Free, low cost, mid level, and now high level without asking whether or not they should. It pryramid graphic looks great on the company annual report to shareholders.
What value is there to develop a new high end package and market it at presumably a much higher price than AD, and then support it?
Just make them add-ons to AD, or include in AD and own the whole damn market.
You know what's especially funny? It is the fact that Cadence has recently done exact opposite - they killed off old Orcad PCB layout engine, and now use exact same engine for all editions of their tools - from entry level Orcad PCB Standard all the way up to Allegro Designer! So now they only have a single codebase to maintain, and fixes become available to all users regardless of level of license they've got.
Case in point is their recent push to upgrade 3D visualization engine. It's now even supports bending of flexies to see if it will hit anything as it bends! As well as full collision checks (you can import a model of your case/housing into designer so that it can check if anything is going to interfere with it). And these changes are available to everyone (yes, even to lowest-tier Standard license)!
« Last Edit: November 14, 2017, 08:23:44 pm by asmi »
 
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