3 ms·

I honestly couldn't tell if you're being serious or doing Real Programmers, but after a quick search Mentor Xpedition seems to be a Siemens product, and I know

by OJFord 3y ago

I honestly couldn't tell if you're being serious or doing Real Programmers, but after a quick search Mentor Xpedition seems to be a Siemens product, and I know (just from YouTube videos of people using Fusion360 or Solidworks) their 3D CAD package is the 'big boy' one for mech engineers, so I'm leaning to the former? I'm just surprised I haven't even heard of them before (I've heard of Cadence but not confident about Allegro) - though I did manage my quasi-EE degree I think without ever touching PCB design! (I've done so before and since, but just Eagle, Kicad, and.. I think it was called CircuitWizard at school.) As a massive tangent, I've repeatedly since thought that CircuitWizard or something like it (or whatever it's called) would actually be great for the sort of Arduino hobbyist/newcomer - it had a really good built-in component library, but quite small, and (crucially for that audience IMO) no or little choice, so really simplified. Like I need a mux of this size, or I need 4 NAND gates or whatever, and you just place that part and it lists the BOM - you're not bogged down with an overwhelming choice where to a newcomer it probably doesn't matter, or at least there's an obvious non-specialised choice.

tverbeure 3y ago
All the PCB designs that I’ve been exposed to professionally, both in-house and at customers in Taiwan (think ODMs for Acer, Asus, …), were designed with Cadence Allegro. These are all complex designs with high-speed interfaces (PCIe, DDR5, …), 12+ layers etc. Ironically, It’s only when I started doing hobby electronics that I learned about the existence of Altium. (That’s not a value judgement of Altium, I honestly don’t know how they compare.)
delfinom 3y ago
Mentor used to be independent but got bought by Siemens. In general, Mentor and Cadence packages are where the serious electrical engineering happens where you are talking about routing gigahertz signals and simulating it. Even thermal simulations are a big deal in those suites.
vrinsd 3y ago
1 point by vrinsd 14 minutes ago | root | parent | next | edit | delete [–] I won't be as snide as bsder, but I will say Expedition and Allegro let you handle some crazy complex designs, which are much more of a challenge with Altium. Things like DDR3/4/5, 10+ layer PCBs, complex design rules, etc. Personally I think Expedition is much much easier to use than Allegro ; for the curious it was actually created by a company called 'Veribest' that Mentor later acquired. Having using Altium (all the way back to when it was Protel 98/99SE) it's gained a lot of impressive capability but it never shed a number of weird UI oddities. I'm really happy to see the direction KiCad is going, having used it circa v3 era, it's MUCH more usable.

by OJFord 3y ago

tverbeure 3y ago

All the PCB designs that I’ve been exposed to professionally, both in-house and at customers in Taiwan (think ODMs for Acer, Asus, …), were designed with Cadence Allegro. These are all complex designs with high-speed interfaces (PCIe, DDR5, …), 12+ layers etc. Ironically, It’s only when I started doing hobby electronics that I learned about the existence of Altium. (That’s not a value judgement of Altium, I honestly don’t know how they compare.)

delfinom 3y ago

Mentor used to be independent but got bought by Siemens. In general, Mentor and Cadence packages are where the serious electrical engineering happens where you are talking about routing gigahertz signals and simulating it. Even thermal simulations are a big deal in those suites.

vrinsd 3y ago

1 point by vrinsd 14 minutes ago | root | parent | next | edit | delete [–] I won't be as snide as bsder, but I will say Expedition and Allegro let you handle some crazy complex designs, which are much more of a challenge with Altium. Things like DDR3/4/5, 10+ layer PCBs, complex design rules, etc. Personally I think Expedition is much much easier to use than Allegro ; for the curious it was actually created by a company called 'Veribest' that Mentor later acquired. Having using Altium (all the way back to when it was Protel 98/99SE) it's gained a lot of impressive capability but it never shed a number of weird UI oddities. I'm really happy to see the direction KiCad is going, having used it circa v3 era, it's MUCH more usable.