Allegro HDL free viewer

Hi Matt,

The Allegro PDF Publisher might be what you want although it's not free to publish your schematics in intellegent PDF.
I saw a demo at CDNLive earlier this month and the pdf files produced are every bit as useful as any free viewer.
I think it's overpriced at the rumoured list price.
It's available in 15.7

Cheers, Dave

I have looked at that. Pretty useful tool, and I agree, WAY overpriced. But hey, its Cadence ;-)

The functionality that would be missing would be the ability to cross probe. Select or highight a net in the schematic and the same net is highlighed in the layout.

Matt

Agreed. The PDF Design Publisher is a worthy upgrade but, as Matt said, it is severely overpriced It is NO substitute for a viewer as it is missing the critical feature that a viewer should have - cross-probing.

Many [most, in fact] other major EDA vendors have functionally complete but feature-reduced viewers: Protel, P-CAD, Altium, PADS, and CADSTAR. Not having a cross-probing viewer for EITHER the Concept/Allegro or Capture/Layout Plus suites is an amazing omission from a company that should be leading the way in EDA. It makes the availability of the Allegro Physical Viewer essentially worthless to my company. I can think of lots of uses for a viewer, and as there's an Allegro Physical Viewer from Cadence and viewers from the companies/packages listed above, there is an obvious need for a viewer by Cadence's customers.

Maybe sometime, delayed by many years, and for an outrageous amount of money we can see a Concept viewer from Cadence. I'm not holding my breath, but hey, Vista is only days away from being released so anything is possible.

C'mon Cadence: it's now 2007 - GET WITH THE PROGRAM!!

As a new user transitioning from PCAD to Allegro/Orcad I was very disappointed in the functionality of the viewer.  The absence of being able to do cross-probing at all is por.  I have looked at many other packages and this is standard.  Does anyone know of other options for indivduals that only require view capabilities, but need cross probing? 

Cadence would do itself good to look at the free PCAD viewer.  It gave the viewer all the functionality of PCAD except for any editting related functions.  All th query functions.

 You are absolutely right my friend. Cadence has really dropped the ball by forcing their customers to pay for the PDF Publisher, which has some nice bonuses over a 'dumb' PDF file, but it is in no way comparable to a 'real' viewer that should be FREE. The lack of crossprobing/highligting (which doesn't even work correctly in the full version of SPB) and a totally unfamiliar schematic environment give Cadence a grade of 'F' on the viewer front.

P-CAD has the total package for viewers and Cadence would do well to emulate what P-CAD offered. Isn't it sad that the benchmark we've discussed is nearly a decade old and discontinued while Cadence has stuck their head in the sand and left their users with empty pockets and no decent viewer. It's truly sad and unforgiveable.

Maybe we can all band together and convince Cadence to fix this grevious oversight. Who's with me? And what can we do?