: Dear sci.electronics.cad groupies,
: has anyone experience with EXPEDITION PCB and ViewDraw from Mentor? Can
: you recommend it?
I have had a lot of experience with ViewDraw, which is called
"DxDesigner" these days. I have used it for several years at various
corporations around Boston, MA, where it seems to be the standard
schematic capture program [1]. It is an easy to use package; it
behaves very intuitively. It used to be kind of buggy [2], but my
current version (8.1.0) hasn't caused too many problems. OTOH, I did
more difficult designs in the past (more hierarchy with re-used
blocks), and the OATS technology was a major source of bugs. Sometimes
my design and the output netlists wouldn't agree. In that case, I had
to delete all the .wir files in order to get rid of old, hidden stuff
which was confusing the program. Nowadays I am not doing such
complicated stuff, so perhaps that's why ViewDraw is better behaved.
I can't speak for Expedition; I have only seen the Mentor sales demo.
It looked pretty cool & very capable.
: How much do either cost in the USA or elsewhere?
ViewDraw and Expedition are high-end products useful for complicated
designs. Bundled together they cost around $10K -- $20K I believe,
perhaps more. If you are doing high-end stuff (big boards, many
thousands of nets, eight or more layers, routing constraints, diff
pairs, hierarchy, etc.), then they are appropriate tools, and I'd
recommend them. I'd also recommend having an in-house tools guru who
can help you out when the tools misbehave.
If you're not doing high-end stuff, then they are too much money.
Stuart (who continues to advocate the free, open-source gEDA Suite for
low- and mid-level circuit design:
http://www.geda.seul.org/ )
[1] I hear that Cadence's "Capture" is more common on the West
Coast. True?
[2] But not nearly as buggy as Protel, which sets the standard for
misbehaving EDA software.