Altium Designer

Kommentare: As part of an electronic design team, Altium is an invaluable tool for cooperatively developing our designs. The robust library and project management features mean it is easy to have multiple engineers working on a design, and have everyone contributing to the company's library of components and templates. We can easily export 3D models of the PCBs for the mechanical team to check against physical constraints and the wide range of design file export formats keeps board houses happy. The ability to import designs and libraries from almost any other PCB package has been very useful and is worth mentioning.

Vorteile: Creating and editing library components is straightforward and mostly works without error. The library and project management features are very powerful and suited to working in a corporate environment with large libraries.
PCB layout editor is excellent with intelligent and relatively intuitive controls and behaviour. The view of the PCB layers can easily be customised to provide the clearest image of the user's desired section of the design.
The 3D PCB view is great for easily visualising the board being worked on and can be used for basic fit-checking for enclosure and housings.
If the company regularly designs PCBs for a certain enclosure or package space, a custom project template can be created, meaning when a new design is started the board area and any keep-outs and other restrictions are already loaded, saving time and mistakes.

Nachteile: As a relatively heavyweight piece of software, startup times are slow and file access can be sluggish, especially if working on a network.
Many of the default settings are not helpful, for example the connection matrix which determines which combinations of IC pin types on a net will cause an error. The default settings generate dozens of spurious warnings for a moderate-size schematic.
The Bill of Materials feature, while useful, can be painful to use as it takes several minutes to generate the component table for a moderately complex design. This must be repeated if a mistake is found and a change must be made to the schematic.

Vorteile: The 3D CAD integration has been an absolutely killer feature for my company. Several projects literally could not have gone to market without it. The competitive edge that it gives my company to design clever, compact designs has effectively paid for the Altium license several times over. As a product, Altium Designer is unbeatable without paying 3-10x as much. Possibly much more, I didn't explore that market extensively once it became clear the wealth of features that Altium Designer offered.

Nachteile: Altium, as a company makes me wonder about Altium Designer's long term prospects. The company has made several questionable market decisions in the past 5 years that makes me uncertain if their upper management really understands how their users use their product. Ah, well. They're not the first company to have this problem.

Kommentare: I use Altium to layout (not simulate) PCB for both prototyping and production. The software does a great job simplifying line and via placement, including it's push features. The rule system is robust if often frustrating and can be very useful helping to catch various board requirements (think differential pair lengths). Overall I find Altium to be very useful and infinitely better than old school layout methods, but it can also be very frustrating with various features broken in updates.

Vorteile: Altium simplifies PCB layout with a very useful set of features and easy customization of icons and hotkeys.

Nachteile: Every update (and they come regularly) breaks something new. And once something you used to like finally gets fixed, something new will break. Also, how to add/change polygon pour vertices changes all the time and it drives me nuts.

Vorteile: As an engineering undergraduate we have to design lots of printed circuit boards. When I am using Altium designer I could easily design foot print according to the component I chose to use. In altium designer we can easily import the changes we made on the schematic . If we did any changes on the PCB design layout which are not on the schematic those changes also can be export to the schematic. We can customize the design rules such as track width, pad sizes, clearance and etc as we needed. That will help us to have the perfect PCB. When its comes to routing, auto-routing option in the altium is perfect. We only need to adjust routing rules according to our work then altium will do the routing part. We can easily generate files that are need to print PCB for an example if need to generate gerber files we only need to go the option that let us create gerber files and select the required layers and formats.

Nachteile: If you are new to PCB designing it will be little bit difficult to learn altium at the first place with the time we will get familiar to the altium designer. If you looking for footprint for free in online sources it will little bit difficult.

Kommentare: I've use Altium to successfully create hundred of boards, and it generally works well.

Vorteile: Altium has a great but not perfect 3D rendering tool. The ability to import correctly scaled and detailed component parts allows the user to visualised a highly realistic image of the completed PCB.

Nachteile: The Autorouter is utter rubbish and I can't believe they haven't made any notable improvements to it over years. New features are implemented half baked and often full of bugs.
The new 'Draftsman' tool is supposed to allow you to create better technical drawings of the board, but it really doesn't fulfil its promise. It's cumbersome, does not allow component values to be annotated to the drawing - instead only component Idents are drawn.
The library system is messy and it's easy to get parts and footprints messed up. they tried to fix this with integrated libraries, but left the original library system in place so there's no consistent way to work.