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Defending Allegro

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Hello All.

I apologize if this belongs on a different forum.

I regularly recommend Allegro+OrCAD CIS to my clients and customers and so far I've had very high acceptance / adoption.

However, I am currently being asked to defend replacing a company's toolset from basic level PADS to Allegro.  The in-house designer thinks Allegro is crap and after 10 minutes of use he stormed in to see me and told me I was full of it.

He asked "what does Allegro do that PADS doesn't? Every I see takes longer to do in Allegro"

I have seen lots of nits in my own perusal of PADS but I am asking those who have successfully used both tools to chime in as to pros and cons.

Thanks,
Bill


Originally posted in cdnusers.org by redwire
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  • archive

    Hi Bill,
    I'm an old Pads hand, and saw it's progression from the days of DOS to Windows on PowerPCB. It's an adequate tool. It does get the job done.

    But the capacity built into Allegro is hands down, far and away, orders of magnitude more powerful than PowerPCB. Ease of use aside, as both tools have their pros and cons, Allegro has WAY more flexibility and depth.

    [caveat; I've been using Allegro solely for the last 5 years and haven't seen the latest developments in PowerPCB, so they may have improved things; like, remove the maximum 20 or so routing layer limit; improved the padstack editor; etc.]

    As far as task time goes, initially, the user will buck at using Allegro, because it seems it takes longer to do everything (designers can be that way when faced with change...). Of course if you have the patience to get over the steeper learning curve, things improve dramatically. At least they have for me.


    You will also have all the library conversion issues to contend with, as well legacy database conversion if you want to go all the way. That's another issue altogether. Will be happy to chat about it offline if you've found this helpful.

    Thanks
    Andrew

    Andrew Noonan
    CAE, PCB Design
    Cisco Systems, Inc.
    225 East Tasman Drive
    San Jose, CA 95134 USA
    Direct: 408.853-7785
    annoonan@cisco.com
    www.cisco.com


    Originally posted in cdnusers.org by annoonan
Reply
  • archive

    Hi Bill,
    I'm an old Pads hand, and saw it's progression from the days of DOS to Windows on PowerPCB. It's an adequate tool. It does get the job done.

    But the capacity built into Allegro is hands down, far and away, orders of magnitude more powerful than PowerPCB. Ease of use aside, as both tools have their pros and cons, Allegro has WAY more flexibility and depth.

    [caveat; I've been using Allegro solely for the last 5 years and haven't seen the latest developments in PowerPCB, so they may have improved things; like, remove the maximum 20 or so routing layer limit; improved the padstack editor; etc.]

    As far as task time goes, initially, the user will buck at using Allegro, because it seems it takes longer to do everything (designers can be that way when faced with change...). Of course if you have the patience to get over the steeper learning curve, things improve dramatically. At least they have for me.


    You will also have all the library conversion issues to contend with, as well legacy database conversion if you want to go all the way. That's another issue altogether. Will be happy to chat about it offline if you've found this helpful.

    Thanks
    Andrew

    Andrew Noonan
    CAE, PCB Design
    Cisco Systems, Inc.
    225 East Tasman Drive
    San Jose, CA 95134 USA
    Direct: 408.853-7785
    annoonan@cisco.com
    www.cisco.com


    Originally posted in cdnusers.org by annoonan
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