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Import PCB from Altium

Hello

Is there some mean to transfer a PCB design from Altium Designer to Allegro PCB SI. Altium has plenty export options (unfortunately without Allegro), but Allegro SI very few. At first glance it seems that there is no "intersections".

How to proceed ?

Had somebody a similar experience ?

Sure there is DXF at both sides, but does it work correctly ?

Thanks in advance.

Pavel.

Mstrghettorigg over 13 years ago

I was looking into this while back, but I was never able to get it to work. Here are some links to some of the previous posts.
http://www.cadence.com/Community/forums/p/5984/6523.aspx#6523
http://www.cadence.com/Community/forums/p/18269/1260731.aspx#1260731
Good Luck!
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Pavel47 over 13 years ago
Thanks for answer.

I've checked your links. The 1st seems to be without issue, the second propose some PDIF option. But I couldn't found it in Altium. Here is the list of actually supported export formats (taken from official Altium site):

Altium PCB Binary (*.PcbDoc)
Altium PCB binary V3.0, V4.0 (*.PCB)
Altium PCB binary V5.0 (*.PcbDoc)
Altium PCB ASCII (*.PcbDoc)
Protel Netlist (*.net)
AutoCAD DWG/DXF (*.dwg, *.dxf)
HyperLynx (*.hyp)
P-CAD ASCII (*.pcb)
Protel PCB 2.8 ASCII (*.pcb)
Protel Netlist (*.net)
Specctra Design File (*.dsn)
SDRC-IDF Brd Files (*.brd)
STEP (*.step, *.stp)
SiSoft Files (*.csv)
Ansoft Neutral File (*.anf)

As one can constate, there is no any PDIF.

Regards.

Pavel.
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ScottCad over 13 years ago

Pavel
I think you would want to export that altium board as a p-cad file. Back in the day the older or original P-CAD Master Designer allowed the exporting of it's database in a ascii format with a pdif extension. I assume that this format is what altium still uses. You can try export the file and then open it with a text editor, if it is the original P-CAD format it will look like this, go to page 7 of this link
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:1-oTchI4xOMJ:www.datest.com/docs/cad-conv/PCAD.DOC+p-cad+master+designer+pdif+file&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESjt1LrHkWhFc9d-GHvNtSA3OXfv7CKX-JS-vCBFTN9m70joh7H4o3KdGU3D5kFSYTd8hYkaQOD-OU78ZCz3wArl_wqgM6vRAB2l9H01QB9ieGgI2-jlr5PubV9g-jNsbrQ0vpHS&sig=AHIEtbSPeZNFl5fSV3jdDTomoeHM503TRQ
That is an example of the older PDIF format. More than likely altiumn will export it at a ver 7 or 8 PDIF file.
What you would want to do after the export is import that PDIF file using the p-cad translator in Orcad Layout and create a layout .max file. If you have access to Orcad Layout it will be a whole lot easier to clean that file up than in allegro. Final step would be to import the max file into allegro.
Try export hat file and post a snip of the header here so I can look at it for you. I am curious to know if it is still in the old PDIF format
Thanks Scott
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