[spacedcowboy]

If you need it, the field solver for high-speed diff pairs in Altium is head and shoulders above the approximation techniques in the online tools - which never agree with each other anyway. Kicad is no better than the online ones.

The price of a standalone field solver (which would be more capable than Altium’s, for sure) is more than the price of Altium…

Given that an FPGA can output a lot of diff pairs at pretty high speeds these days, even us hobbyists can have a need for this sort of tech.

[samtho]

99% of the time, I’m routing CMOS logic, i2c, SPI, maybe a CAN network here or there. I have maybe 10 projects where I worked with anything so critical that it required the most precise diff pair length matching. I think SRAM was the only that actually was affected by lackadaisically ran diff pairs.

Even then, KiCAD has successfully guided me to routing a number of signals that are capable of data transmission well into the megahertz range.

[lnsru]

Designed gigabit Ethernet board and one with FPGA+DDR3 using KiCad 5 and it was ok. Don’t see benefit in OrCAD or Altium here. Maybe for 60 GHz there might be some benefit. Bet that’s not my working frequency range.

[ilyt]

Yeah. If you need it. Which in most times is resounding "well it would save me some time but not really, I can get by".