I was on the CS/CMPro beta for a couple of years......I came off it a few months ago after I got fed up. I gave Altium a closing report when I left.
I switched to KiCad when V6 came out. I haven't looked back.
Ian.
I was looking for an upgrade to gain post-routing signal integrity with Altium/Orcad Pro/eCadStar, but it's *really* expensive.
May I should switch on Kicad/Qucs/LTSpice/... and spend the money on hardware?
Because AFAIK Eagle/AltiumCS/AltiumCM offer nothing more than Kicad?
Spend the money on HW, as in rather than get SI simulation software, you'll just layout the board with TPs,have an assembly house do a one-off run, then use actual probing hardware to capture eye-diagrams and envelopes?
I'm not sure what specifically you're looking at re: PCB SI (LVDS? CLK distribution? S21?) or if you want other features (PDN?) but imo it's really Cadence (Orcad) is basically king of the mountain. It'll work with ANSYS HFSS and their whole EM suite. Or like, basically every other sim software out there, despite having their own Sigrity software (vendors would go out of their way to lock you into their physics package if they, themselves, were selling one).
License seats are expensive, and you're using an ancient TK-based scripting language code base, but you'll be able to call in and get an English speaking rep who will walk you through what you need, and won't cockblock your access to an actual developer. Within 40 hours (which is not much time at all, if you're moving to an entire new package and sim-platform) you'll be up and running. Also, they're pretty flexible with bundling (say, discounts if you want to have a Sigrity license tossed in). Hell, I haven't talked to sales in a long time, but you could just flat out say something like -- listen, I need __ __ and __, can you just set up a VM on Amazon with a 14 day seat so I can see if it fits my needs?
Also, back on topic, CS was so great and ugh. Eagle 7 was great too but I refuse to buy anything that involves recurring subscriptions. I give you money, you give me some bytes that I copy onto my hard disk and I use until you develop features I find merit paying you more money for. Transaction completed. I don't want to have to have a "cloud account" or whatever in order to load your software. I don't want to risk some hidden legalese in the EULA allowing for "security updates" which are "required" and bundled with them obligatory auto-updates (a la Chrome/Firefox on load), which will effectively take control of the full binary. If I can't take a HDD snapshot of my install, make a VMware* image out of a fully-offline compatible piece of software I've licensed, you're eliminating my ability to future-proof/revise old designs.
Finally, if you know specifically what you're looking at, there are physics packages like FreeFEM which will get you 90% of the way there. Again, since I don't know the details of your problem I can't point you to any specific module. There's a good chance you don't know what your problem is to begin with (I mean, cmon, EEs
ideally should think of everything at the PDE/Maxwells eq level, but if you're like me, you don't- so you don't know which one of the 50 modules to pick which will ultimately solve, given the proper initial/boundary conditions, your issue--which is why I suspect ANSYS can get away with charging what they do (solving PDEs that can be represented in 4 lines of scipy). I digress.
My issue with all of these packages are they're just like a gas. As computational/rendering resources get cheaper ("the room gets bigger"), the overhead of these packages get larger (the engineers care less of performance optimizations, "hey what's 10k cycles versus 2k cycles when we have Intel I9s" so the 'gas spreads out'). KiCad and Altium both have this problem- try the following. Layout a Zync + memories + a PDN and some trivial peripherals like HDMI out. The only other constraints are you gotta keep full DRC compliance according to the Zync sheet-- so length-match all those traces, ensure your termination resistors are all there. See how fucking slow Altium is compared to Cadence. KiCad just crashes when I try to move a memory bank's /16 or whatever on top of a pre-existing component. Cadence is worth it just for the data-sheet OCR import library tool and the 'maintain a consistent length by serpentine routing' tool (though maybe Altium has that? Not sure, haven't used it in ages)
*VMware price-gouges almost at the Oracle level for their enterprise software, but VMWare Workstation Pro since v9 has done what I have paid for it to do without any of that license fuckery. They've built up sufficient credibility IMO that I don't worry about that shit