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by elcritch
1698 days ago
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> KiCAD is very good for an open-source tool that can produce basic PCBs. However, modern paid CAD tools are on a different level entirely. Not all of them. I personally chose Kicad 5 over Eagle because Eagle's UX was a pain to use. I just never found any advantages over Kicad despite a few clunky parts of the Kicad 5 the overall experience in Kicad was just more productive. Of course, most of my designs have been sub-10MHz with a few 25-50 MHz Ethernet parts. Statements like this just leave me wondering what useful features the high end software provides that are really missing? Do they automatically re-tune differential pairs after you move things around? Many companies still seem to have separate people or software for doing BOM management so it'd seem they're not superior in that aspect either. Just feels like I'm missing something. > The differences may not be obvious for simple boards with low speed connections, but it’s a world of difference to use one of the high end CAD tools on a complex board with high speed traces. That covers a significant amount of the board practical PCB's that are needed for a lot of projects. Still I've been told Altium and such are much better for high speed signals, but also been told that Altium _doesn't_ do 2.5D or signal simulation and that you need to goto the next tier of commercial vendors. |
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Yes, in fact they can length re-rematch groups of differential pairs.
Altium does not have built in SI analysis, but it does have optional DC PI analysis, and likely AC in the future.
Most SI and PI are point tools anyway, so even if you use Cadence, it’s not built-in, rather requires importing into another tool.