Hi everyone, I'm in the process of buying my first CAD for PCB design and need some recommendations. It seems Altium is the ultimate product but it also comes at an ultimate price. I'm not a professional electrical engineer and need something that will work for my simple projects. I don't foresee anything overly complex. Mostly single sided, 1 layer designs. Ideally I want something that will talk to Solidworks, so I've been looking into Solidworks PCB (Altium Circuit Studio) (the only problem is I can't find a reseller for it at the moment), so maybe I'll have to go for Altium Circuit Studio and hopefully it works with Solidworks.
After reading a few threads about its limitations I'm not sure if it's the right choice as seen below from one of the threads:
In case anyone else comes across this thread in a google search as I did, I'm going to list the specific reasons why CircuitStudio isn't a viable option for me at work (though I'm considering getting it for use at home on freelance jobs). Obviously Altium has everything I need because that's what I'm using at work now, so I'll just focus on what's missing in CS. Keep in mind that, unlike what others have mentioned, I don't really do anything "advanced" in Altium at all. I don't do signal integrity or anything fancy like that, my boards are typically at most 4-6 layers, I don't do chip-on-board or embedded passives. My work is pretty lackluster! That said, here are the key things missing from CS that would make it unusable for me:
- Specific No-ERC: I use this all the time as there are always a few things that require me to violate my own rules
- Push while dragging: how can they not have this?? I always add single traces after-the-fact, and pushing other traces out of the way saves me the time of manually rerouting other traces
- Rigid Flex Support: this is a definite no-go for me; I don't do fancy flex designs, usually just single layer, but I generally don't put things like through-hole metric circular connectors on-board, and will attach them with a fpc ribbon to my rigid board; the lack of rigid flex support tells me you likely can't have multiple stacks but I'm not sure; it's just scary to me that they list this as a lacking feature
- Polygone and Plane Management: I'm not sure if this means you can't do polygons at all, but it seems CS is very light on polygon and plane support all around, so this at least concerns me.
- Holes and vias: again, very lacking; you can't even do non-round holes, for example plated slots; I have LCDs and other devices that have rectangular tabs; pretty much any non-circular mechanicals won't be supported. Also you only can do simple vias, so you get no control over the stackup; you can, however, do blind and buried vias (which I rarely use because they're so expensive in fabrication).
- Object classes: this is a big one; no net classes, no component classes. This kills pretty much any moderately complex design where you need to highlight or select nets or components based on function, etc. Also, no rooms, which is at best an inconvenience.
- Manufacturing rules: this is another big one; no checks for hole clearance, net antennae, silk clearance, mask slivers, etc. I rely heavily on these rules.
- True type text only: I'm pretty amazed by this. This means no stroked fonts, which I use almost exclusively
- Scripting: can't do it in CS. For me this is at best an inconvenience. I use one script to check for unrouted nets, but I'm sure more advanced designers use scripting a lot.
- Component Libraries: no DB or vault access, which is another big one for me since all of my component infos are in a local SQL db for quick adding and editing; everything ties back to intlibs, but none of my schlib components have any parameters, so this would be a huge undertaking to go back to standard and intlibs only.
- STEP files: while you can import component STEP models, you can't export STEP files, which is another killer for me because all of my boards get exported to STEP (along with components) to my mechanical engineer for solid modelling of cases, etc.
- Output: No IPC2581; I've never quite understood the purpose of this, but my fab houses all require this, so the lack of this is another no-go for CS; also no output jobs which is at best an inconvenience because you have to manually export each thing you need for the fab house (gerbers, etc.)
So those are the big things; bottom line, CS is no good for using at work, but I would certainly consider using it at home for freelance stuff just to save money.
I don't really have much experience to fall back on in terms of relating to most of those issues. The only real issue that I'm a bit worried about is non round pads. I'm planning on making my own PCBs and don't have means to be super precise with my designs, so a lot of the time I'll have strange non round pads to increase contact surface area as much as possible. Having said that, I will need to do square pads for Surface Mount components so it seems like Circuit Studio won't work for me, but I'm not sure.
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