Mentor Graphics Pads 2009 Crack
Favio Cassidy
Some free advertising copy for Mentor Graphics and their DX Designer ( I hearby formally and legally renounce to all parties and for all time the use of the following text by anyone including Mentor Graphics (may their nipples crumble into crusty bits in very public places and to their great displeasure, just because they deserve it for vending such UTTER CRAP as USABLE PRODUCT, PraiseBob!):
I mean, crikies! Is this a safari into the darkest jungle or an honest business transaction? Do you pay for what you reasonably expect and then get those features, or are you expected to make a lifestyle change that requires re-training and re-education to make use of the product?
My subtle point is that unless you provide that feedback they will not have the opportunity to improve. (While improving the documentation based on your feedback will not address the learning curve challenges for you, the customer support option could be your tactical solution)
i duno.. we tried Altium Designer 2009 and punted after a year it because it was unstable, buggy, bloated and just inefficient. Looks like there is market space for some company to come provide a solid sch/pcb. We wnt back to PCAD and just zoom along (even without fancy features that crash the program).
I have tried lots of EDA PCB tools, and my worst experience was with Mentor Pads. An absolutely bad designed software, with lots of bugs and a terrible help system. When I work with this piece of crap I have to smoke lots of cigars to keep relaxed. The people from Mentor have absolutely no compassion for the people that are actually going to work with their tools. Because of mentor I began drinking and taking pills!!! I prefer Altium and Allegro by 20dB more than the Mentor dissaster tools.
Seriously, I want to kill the responsible managers at MG, then leave their bodies in Batman suits hanging with jars of mayonnaise clutched in their hands.
I hate them and their product and their utter disdain for users THAT MUCH.
Arrrrg! Standards are good, but only if you are very careful when setting them. PADS is such a bullshit standard, like hitting on the last girl standing at closing time (not intending to sound sexist, just observant of semi-human behavior).
Yeah, first thing installing their trial to check how crappy it was, errors starting to pop up during the install (ewww). After that buggy install finishes, I tried to turn DXD on and was met with a software malfunction. It was only after I tweaked with the compatibly feature before I can get a proper install and actually have the program running.
It is sad to me as an engineer, having gone from doing layouts with tape and mylar through the modern crop of software tools,
to see a once fine product devolve into the current mess, taking all its installed base down the the garden path of reduced functionality with it.
I laughed all the way through the description of using the Mentor Graphics package. Pissing in the snow describes the experience quite well. I have been using Altium/Protel/Tango for many years and attempting to use MG is nothing short of painful.
To conclude all of the Engineers that I have talked to and worked with LOVE Aldec because every time RnD design a new tool or update the Active HDL or the Rivierea PRO or A-Lint it is in line with the feed back we get from the Engineers in the field. In fact I challenge yall. If you develop FPGA or ASIC platforms and need to Sim. Rather than going directly to hardware. Hit me up and Ill give you a Free Eval. and if needed a Go to Meeting Demo wit hone of our Engineers.
After 28 years I now work for a company that uses McCAD. I have mastered their tools in just hours for the most part. They do everything we need and cost very little to own. The SchematicPlus package is the best thing I have ever used to create schematics. The PCB layout is also easy to use and does everything we need. The Autorouter is great as well.
I started using DxDesigner at the very beginning when it was called Viewdraw from Viewlogic. It was lightweight and fairly natural to use. All the files were stored as human readable text. I often used a text editor to do massive search and replace operations that were tedious in the graphical interface. I also wrote a symbol generator that would take my Xilinx pinout report file and make a customised symbol for my board schematic. Those were the good old days.
I believe that Mentor Graphics Corporation rewrote DxD to use binary files that could not be manipulated by the customer without paying, paying, paying forever. MGC is trying to control our intellectual property to the point that they effectively own it. I became so furious that I decided to do something about it.
At my old company we had funds to support research. While I was there I started a project at BYU to develop a super simple hardware description language for printed circuit design. The idea was to replace these very complicated schematic editor tools with a simple HDL. We call our open-source project PHDL.
I come from an FPGA background using VHDL. Over the years I found that just instantiating the logic I wanted was often more efficient that trying to trick a synthesis tool to do what I wanted. Then I realized that PCB schematic entry was just pure instantiation.
Maybe not the place but I am looking for a new package for 2 users. Currently using Eagle which is simple and OK and meets the basic requirements. Cost is an issue, would love to be under $5k a seat. Looked at Altium and Orcad. The more I read the more I feel like sticking with Eagle for another year. Any thoughts on simple packages dont need any more than 4 layers, IDF output, spice would be sweet, reasonable in price ?
My strongest recommendation is to go with Altium. You will see a return on investment over any other choice in your first project. You will not only experience a higher level of productivity, but your employees and you will be happier.
As mentioned by others, there are cheaper, hobbyist grade products out there, but unless you are doing a very simple board with a single page schematic and only a few small components, the productivity enhancing features will more than pay for itself over paying salary on lost time. Orcad is my second choice, but you have to buy into their $25k per seat package to not have a crippled version.
However, the biggest issue I had with DxDesigner, is the post traumatic distress syndrome that I am still experiencing even after two months of not using it. It is that bad. I had a design done to about 75% when I lost all confidence that I would ever be able to finish it. You see, with DxDesigner, the more you use it the more difficult it gets to go on. Both in the frequency of bugs you encounter as the design files get bigger, and also the psychological effects encountering those bugs has on you.
Switching to Altium was a great releaf. It was designed for productivity. The more you use it, the easier and quicker it becomes. You can actually get very comfortable with it. They have a great tutoral, tons of videos, tons of complete schamatic and PCB layout designs that can be used as examples. And if you have any questions or issues, they have someone knowlegable getting back to you within 24 hours with an answer or solution.
Altium is not perfect, I wish they had better signal integrity simulation that would be active as you lay out the high speed traces, but at least they do not cripple the product as do all of the other higher end packages. I beleive that it is the best choice you can get today for under $25K.
Whatever your choice, do go for the free of charge 30 day evaluation, during which time you give your employee a week of uninterrupted time to spend going through the tutorial and then have them do their own design. If they are successful and happy with the choice, go for it. If they quit in frustration, try another package.
When I attempted to use DxD last summer, Version 9.4, I was in for a shock. DxD was horribly buggy to the point that I could not make any further progress after 15 sheets on a 20 sheet schematic, irrespective of how much effort I put in. It was not a question of knowing how to use the tool, but rather how to get it to do what it used to do when the schematic was smaller without crashing and corrupting the database. (One hint: They disabled the Save option in the File menu.)
Following that experience, Altium was a Godsend. Yes, things are done differently whenever you switch packages, but that is to be expected. With Altium I had recreated the entire design, including all symbols, from scratch and finished it withing a few weeks.
Now this is not to say that Altium is perfect. No one in the engineering world should use it as an excuse to justify complacency. I did come across bugs in Altium, both schematic and layout, and for some of them still demanding that they get fixed. As well as requesting that they fix and add features that are in the high end Allegro and Expedition packages. But the bugs are far easier to live with than the bugs that I had experienced with DxD and older versions of OrCAD.
Now there is still hope for Mentor. A few weeks back I attended one of their PADs seminars and they acknowledged usability and reliability issues with their products. A fairly senior marketing manager personally admitted that DxD had become a piece of crap, both severely outdated (think DOS code base), and buggy. But with the admission, he acknowledged that it is an important product for them and they are throwing substantial resources at redesigning and rewriting key portions of the tools to bring them to modern software design standards and make them more reliable. I have respect for them coming forward, but we shall see what the result this renewed effort brings.
Altium has abandoned the manuals in favor of a Wiki. They claim that this is easier to keep up to date and also they have a shortage of English speaking engineers. Problem is that the Wiki is hard to follow and also badly out of date in many areas. They used to have a tutorial for an older version of the tools, which they removed since it was competing with their expensive training classes.
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