[ploxiln]

I used Cadence a fair bit, back in university (CMU) about 8 years ago - it is really surprisingly poorly made and maintained software.

Very powerful, huge number of features. Crashed if you looked at it funny. Some windows made with TK, some with Athena widgets, some with GTK1, some with straight X11. Can't copy and paste between most of them.

I'm glad to hear it's not really the industry standard I had the impression it was. I had the impression that most purely-hardware-focused engineers didn't care about software quality much and so the whole industry just naturally leaned that way.

[akiselev]

The thing with hardware is that once you've designed the PCB and it works to the spec, you don't need to do anything until some part you need goes out of production. This means that the major ECAD money comes from shops that do a lot of one off projects which means that aerospace and defense are king. Since those industries are risk averse and spend much more time in manufacturing and testing than in design, they never really had much care for the quality of design software, even when it costs an arm and a leg like Cadence. Since these industries have extensive quality control and review processes, a bug or a crash would only cost a little bit of time. Remember though that Orcad was first developed in the mid-eighties so with the risk averse clients it's no wonder it hasn't aged well.

But yes, rest assured, outside of some (rather large) niches, no one really tolerates the garbage that is the old ECAD packages.

[gricardo99]

haha, you almost exactly described the Cadence HDL simulation suite, used for HDL simulation in ASIC/FPGA design. But... it is widely used in industry. Their tools are so buggy, and poorly made.