http://www.terrypin.dial.pipex.com/ECADList.html
martin
joshua wrote:
There are several major packages offered by the big CAD vendors. They
are also very costly.
Thee are many alternatives more reasonably priced.
Take your pick.
Graham
joshua wrote:
None is 'mostly used by all major companies'.
If only it were that simple !
Graham
Just wait until Microsoft starts making EDA tools. :-)
If they can't even code a competent word processor what makes you think
I'd wait for their undoubtedly feeble attempts at EDA ?
Graham
I realise it was a joke, but for sure, Microsoft simply wouldn't be
interested in such a small market !
Graham
When I worked at Big Company, we ussd Mentor Graphics high-end tools.
These tools have a lot of features that are only beneficial to large
companies. Also, while it seems that the backend part of the software
is robust, the frontend (GUI) leaves a little bit to be desired. The
software is so expensive that only a major company can buy it (or would
want to).
Anyway, I believe the individual tools I used were the design manager
(aka design mangler) protoview (for looking at the layout), and ICX, which
is a signal integrity simulator that can read the mentor graphics layout
file and create a signal integrity model on the fly. You have to add ibis
models for the nets you want to simulate.
A lot of application engineers use orcad capture for their evaluation
board designs. I use this occasionally at my current job. This is probably
a better commercial offering for a small company. I don't have first hand
experience with any other commercial software.
For non-commercial software, the gEDA suite seems to be the way to go. You
can use gschem for schematic capture, and pcb for layout. Both are under
active development and getting better all the time.
It seems like cadence and mentor have gobbled up just about all the major
EDA software, so you might just go look at their websites.
--Mac
The most recent ready -to-run Windoze gEDA binaries
are dated September 2003.
This means that to use gEDA, you will have to do one of the following:
1) Use a 2-year-old Windows-compatible release.
2) Compile your own current Windows-compatible executables.
3) Set up a Linux box and run the current Linux binaries.
4) Set up a Linux box and compile your own Linux-compatible
executables.
Another open source project (gratis and libre)
is one which makes it easy to run itself under Windoze: KiCAD.