Your observations of Mentor's Expedition, is quite correct. Protel is known for it's editors and interfaces or ease of use. Expedition is the only other CAD system product that comes close in terms of ease of use. Visula, Allegro, Pads, Pcad all are cumbersome, confusing and painful to use compared to Protel's 99se or DXP or Altium's Designer and Expedition.
You are also correct when it comes to differential pair routing with respect to Expedition Vs. Protel, and the misunderstanding about Protel's level of accuracy. 00.00001 should be accurate enough, and will send most every Fabrication house into a tale spin If they had to make a substrate or PC board that accurate. Protel's Designer package has by far the mosts features per dollar, over any other cad system, including Expedition. The prices vary but in general I understand Allegro is 50-72K, Zuken's products 36-45K, Expedition is 50-52k per seat, Pcad 10-12 , Pads 12-16k and Protel is 8-10k.. With Protel's product performing some 85-90% of all the required or truly needed functions of even the most expensive Cad product, that make it a clear winner from A price performance perspective. I guess it becomes a question as to how important gate and pin swapping and diff. Pair routing is for you as a user vs. what your management is willing to pay. Is it worth the additional 40K to 62K difference? That is a hard call.. how many boards, how many differential pairs per hour etc.. one method vs. another.. Money is usually the great tie breaker. Best Wishes, Samuel Coulbourne Cox Jr. PCB Design and Consulting Services (408) 268-9779 -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Brooks,Bill Sent: Monday, September 26, 2005 9:52 AM To: 'Protel EDA Discussion List' Subject: RE: [PEDA] Protel vs Expedition I have used Mentor Expedition, it does have some desirable features, but like Abd says, the rare design might need the features of Mentor, but the common design can be handled by Protel admirably. Things that Protel can't do... automatic pin swapping and gate swapping is probably the most glaring. It will do this in a limited sense for folks who are doing embedded systems and design the CPLD using Protel's software, but otherwise, the hooks for doing true pin and gate swapping have been broken since Protel 2.8 and still aren't fixed. But we are always hopeful that Altium will do the development necessary to offer that feature. The ability to interactively route lines in pairs and have the router obey the design rules is another thing that Mentor does well that Protel does not. Differential pairs has been a needed improvement for some time as well. Auto Routing is something Mentor bought... Veribest (used to be Cadnetix) had the best router around and Mentor bought them and incorporated their product into Mentor's product line and it gave Mentor an edge where they were failing miserably before... The price model they are using though is limiting the customer base that they have to only large corporations that do their own design in house and can afford the high maintenance fees required to engineer the products that only Mentor and Cadence can address at this time. Still I fear for their future in this tight market and like Intergraph, Applicon, Calay, Telesys, and others, they may be heading for the dinosaur status if they don't change their business model. But that's good for Altium, because there are more and more folks looking for a more cost effective design system. Best regards, Bill Brooks - KG6VVP PCB Design Engineer, C.I.D.+, C.I.I. Tel: (760)597-1500 Ext 3772 Fax: (760)597-1510 Datron World Communications, Inc. _______________________________________ San Diego Chapter of the IPC Designers Council Communications Officer, Web Manager http://dcchapters.ipc.org/SanDiego/ http://pcbwizards.com -----Original Message----- From: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, September 26, 2005 8:10 AM To: Protel EDA Discussion List Subject: Re: [PEDA] Protel vs Expedition At 11:47 PM 9/25/2005, yijie wrote: >Hi > >I am a current user of Expedition, but is considering purchasing Protel too. >But I am not sure if Protel can support me in the same manner as >Expedition does. > >For example: > >1) Mentor can go up to 120 layers; Protel only 32 layers. That's not quite correct. Protel supports at least 70 layers. 32 layers is the positive copper limitation, you can also have 16 internal planes, 16 mechanical layers, plus the appropriate top and bottom layers: solder mask, component legend, paste mask. I have *once* seen a design where the number of layers in Protel was possibly a limitation, a 50-layer multilayer ceramic module. However, using the full 50 layers was not necessary, or was it desirable, the design was accomplished within 32. Unless what you are doing is very unusual, layer count will not be a practical limitation. >2) Mentor can go down to micron units; Protel can only design in mils units. This is not correct. The database unit in Protel is the microinch, I think. Sometimes people read the specification incorrectly, for it says 0.001 to 99999 mils. That was not a slip, it is indeed 0.001 mil, or one-thousandth of a mil, one millionth of an inch, 0.025 micron. The Protel resolution is forty times higher than the reported resolution of Mentor (unless Mentor can handle fractions of a micron, I don't know). >There maybe other Protel limitations, but I am only now aware of >these 2. If anyone out there can tell me more about what Protel can >do or can't do, this will help me in considering purchasing Protel >for my PCB design. > >I would appreciate if someone can offer me advantages of Protel that >Expedition does not have. Protel is probably simpler and easier to use. This can translate into faster design. Expedition is a more powerful system, at least in some ways. It ought to be, it is far more expensive. If you really want a comparison, do put some effort into finding someone who is an expert user for both systems. Someone who is an expert user with one system and who tries another and finds it hard to use may just be experiencing the difficulty of switching systems, for they will be organized differently. Ultimately, you may want to try Protel; and when you do, especially if you are familiar with another system, you will almost certainly find yourself frustrated at times. While it can be helpful to read the manual, engineers are often averse to doing this, and sometimes the manual can itself be frustrating, it is probably not organized to help you translate Expedition procedures into Protel procedures. So in addition to whatever you can find in the manual, if something seems difficult or not well-implemented to you, ask here or on the official Protel DXP forum (or whatever it is called now). One question can save you hours of difficulty. ____________________________________________________________ You are subscribed to the PEDA discussion forum To Post messages: mailto:[email protected] Unsubscribe and Other Options: http://techservinc.com/mailman/listinfo/peda_techservinc.com Browse or Search Old Archives (2001-2004): http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] Browse or Search Current Archives (2004-Current): http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] ____________________________________________________________ You are subscribed to the PEDA discussion forum To Post messages: mailto:[email protected] Unsubscribe and Other Options: http://techservinc.com/mailman/listinfo/peda_techservinc.com Browse or Search Old Archives (2001-2004): http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] Browse or Search Current Archives (2004-Current): http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] ____________________________________________________________ You are subscribed to the PEDA discussion forum To Post messages: mailto:[email protected] Unsubscribe and Other Options: http://techservinc.com/mailman/listinfo/peda_techservinc.com Browse or Search Old Archives (2001-2004): http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] Browse or Search Current Archives (2004-Current): http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]
