Importing from other tools

IMHO, Expedition is a black hole for designs.  Work goes in, can't translate it to anything else. 

PADS would be the biggest compromise.  If you pay by the hour, service bureaus have to charge by the time it takes or they will never get customers to leave it alone and release.

PADS has failed to evolve since the 90's.  No useful real-time DRCs, no crossprobing to a CIS schematic.   No PADS designer ever wants to take the time to rip up the one blocking trace to unblock a whole bunch of other traces. 

Like someone clicked "autoroute" and an excess of vias showed up to wreck your power/gnd planes.

It kills me to say this but Altium might be the lesser of all evils for  the simple reason they have the tools P*DS doesn't have:  better trace shoving, real-time DRCS leading to cleaner route solutions. 

I would look for a shop that can do this in Orcad.  Allegro doesn't care.   And, Orcad has most of the same features but has cheaper software maintenance (might be cheaper than Altium).

No way I would waste my time with a layout house that did not have Cadence.  It makes no sense.  Plus how many resources can you find on the Cadence or EMA-EDA links to help you find a design engineering house?  I would agree with RFinley on the summary of the tools.  If I *had* to take in a tool it would be best from Altium.

Hi Lock

Honestly if your design is in Allegro "Orcad" keep it there. EMA has links to design houses that use Allegro so some of them may be able to assist you. If your company is in the Allegro camp I don't think it would be a good move to have the design completed in a tool such as Pads, Altium etc. Your far better off keeping the design in it's native format - Allegro. On the cad packages you mentioned, Altium may be able to do it better than Pads, Mentor etc but I would verify in advance it can faithfully re-import the completed design back into allegro with good fidelity. Altium has a different layer structure than Allegro. A re-import more than likely will add additional layers to your original Allegro design, for example Mechanical layers etc or whatever additional layers were present in the Altium database.

Depending on what You need I may well be able to assist, let me know.

All the best. 

Should you have issues with the import from Altium, PADS or Expedition, then check Elgris Technologies, Inc.  (elgris.com)

It can import each of those formats with netlist guarantee, etc .