Personally, I 'm used to protel only because I started from it, but it is not so good. I like OrCAD and Layout from cadence, but I am not familiar with it and it needs time.
In my opinion that Expedition 2002 is the best tool, it difficul to use but it is a very power full tool, beside that Cadence PSD 14.2 is also a geat tool, i have use it to layout laptop motherboard P4, It works very nice, and we will see PSD 15 in the near future.
Cadstar is very good in PCB design, but not as good in schematics. There is no simulation. You can use PSPICE to do simulation separately if you don't mind re-enter the schematic for simulation.
Hi All
My opinion is that the family multisim is the more it completes, so much in outlines and simulation as in the pcb drawing.
Cadence Orcad is very complicated
I used for professional use, P*otel and O*cad.
What I found is that P. is better than O. It is much more complete and intuitive and bugless.
O. is not at P. leve but the price is higer!
I designed very complex boards by P*otel (up to 800 mixed traditional and smt parts & 12 layer) without any problem.
I designed very low complexity boards by O*cad (60 mixed parts and 2 layer) with a lot of problems.
I'm absolutely not happy working with O*cad, my fellows too!
Visula has now come out with "Board Designer" package which is an excellant for PCB designs involving complex Ball-Grid-Array foot-prints, river-routing, very quick and instantaneous Signal-Integrity, track-length, impedence, and temperature analysis and many more features.
I think pcb wizard is the best way to make shematics and pcb design
easy to use for bginners it also found in mcu forum browse to kahlid
downlaod a hundred % working copy of it
There are differences between groups of programs. Candence has some that go for a multiple of $10,000. I have talked with a person who uses them in his business of doing layout for others. He pays this hugh price because this program makes best use of his time. For instance, on differential pair lines it will do routing to make the differential impedance what you want and the lengths equal, all automatically as you run the cursor where you want the two traces to go.
Many of the engineers I spoke with uses Orcad for Schematics and Power PCB for Layout. Power PCB is very popular, but I found it not to be very user friendly.