OrCAD users consider the future

Recent changes in the OrCAD® product lineup mean that current OrCAD® users can now consider what electronic design system will meet their future needs in a rapidly-evolving industry.

Successfully moving on from OrCAD® means considering a number of key questions. These represent important issues that need to be resolved before tackling the future of electronic product design, and are comprehensively addressed by Altium Designer.

Is a design system truly unified, or just an assembled set of disconnected point tools?

As design systems have evolved in response to new technology and industry needs, most toolsets attempt to link increasingly complex applications together to form a complete product design solution. The fundamental separation and functional differences between these applications creates a complex and often cumbersome design flow, involves a variety of inconsistent user interfaces, and relies on costly add-ons to complete the toolset.

Altium Designer has been built from the ground-up as a unified electronic product development system that allows engineers to take a design from concept to completion in a single application. The system delivers a consistent user interface through each stage of the design process with menus, hotkeys, keystroke sequences and procedures common across all editors.

Altium Designer also eliminates the need to purchase add-ons at extra cost or integrate legacy applications to improve functionality or make up a complete solution. You receive a complete, powerful design system where there are no hidden initial or ongoing costs in making the design system fully productive.

Does a design product include everything you need for working with the latest technology?

Electronic technology trends such as high-speed design, shrinking device packaging and the emergence of design in the reprogrammable realm mean a design system needs to bridge today’s design needs and those of the future. As the design of products evolve, the electronic development tools capabilities need to be available, without the need to upgrade or purchase expensive add-ons.

Altium Designer future-proofs your organization by providing all the tools required for the latest design technology and techniques, plus those needed into the future. It is a complete system that delivers advanced tools for all aspects of modern design including advanced PCB routing tools, full differential pair support, net-length tuning, impedance controlled routing, PSpice simulation, platform-level support for FPGA integration, plus much more – all available in a single, unified application with no hidden costs.

Is a design product developed through regular updates?

Product updates are an essential part of keeping a design system productive and relevant. Updates need to be regular and provide new design capabilities while resolving any product issues – upgrades should go beyond bug fixes.

Altium maximizes your return on investment by giving you free access to regularly-released product updates that continually enhance Altium Designer with new technologies, innovative features and device support. Updates are frequent and significant, which keeps the design system competitive and productive.

Does a design product offer flexible, cost effective support options?

The right levels of product maintenance and support are essential to keeping a design system productive while constraining costs. A product that requires mandatory, fixed maintenance contracts is only suits a proportion of users and represents a poor return on investment for many.

With Altium, the level of paid maintenance and support is entirely by choice, which provides the freedom to tailor the degree of support to suit a company’s current needs and budget. There are independent choices of Maintenance, Software Assurance, or the software releases can be simply purchased as they become available.

Backing up this flexible arrangement, Altium offers access to regularly-released software enhancements and updated component libraries, unlimited phone support for three months with new Altium Designer licenses, plus access to Altium's extensive online services.

Does the design product deliver a seamless transition process and effective help facilities?

A new design system must provide design migration tools that are much more that just basic file translators. Complete designs need to be transferred to the new system in a structured and error-free way so they are ready to be reused or developed further. Contact with professional support staff plus targeted document resources help a smooth transition process.

Altium Designer's unified data and file translation features allow OrCAD® projects to be quickly transferred and continued within Altium Designer. The sophisticated wizard-based system guides you through single or batch data translation, while handling object mapping and the recreation of project structures in an intelligent way.

Along with Altium’s phone support during the transition period, an extensive range of valuable help resources – many expressly developed for OrCAD® users – are available online. These include ‘how-to’ videos, technical papers, learning guides, reference designs, tutorials, a comprehensive online knowledge base and highly-active community forums.

The best path forward

Altium Designer and its unified approach to electronic product development represents the future of design – a future where device reprogrammability is easily and fully utilized to accelerate the design process and to create more intelligent electronic products faster. By making the move to Altium Designer you can feel confident that you’ve made a choice that opens the door to unprecedented design possibilities using a highly-productive unified electronic product development solution.

Because of this, Altium Designer represents the best path forward for users of traditional point tool solutions like OrCAD®. Altium has invested substantial development effort into creating systems and features within Altium Designer 6 that make the task of successfully transitioning from other design systems as easy as possible.

To find out more, take a look at Moving from OrCAD® to Altium Designer section in the Altium DEMOcenter, where you’ll find a collection of short, helpful videos plus links to further information about moving to Altium Designer.

The way electronic products are developed is changing, with new technology and design methodologies – such as the widespread use of reprogrammable devices and ‘soft’ hardware design – redefining the way products are designed. In order to maintain a competitive advantage in today’s evolving market, it’s important to embrace changing design methodologies.

Harnessing the benefits of this future requires a design system that delivers the latest technology across all sections of the design process in a fully unified product development environment. Altium Designer addresses these issues by providing all electronic designers and engineers with a single, unified application that incorporates all the technologies and capabilities necessary for complete electronic product development.

 
Project in OrCAD   Project in Altium Designer

 

User experiences

“I looked at OrCAD® and PADS® and found each one to be lacking in its capabilities in one area of design or another. Altium Designer was the first package I worked with that had strong capabilities in both schematic capture and board layout. While all vendors offered an integrated solution, Altium Designer was the only one to truly unify the design process”

Carter Moursand
VP Engineering, eSolar

“We moved from OrCAD® because long-standing instability problems were not being resolved. After evaluating several design systems we chose Altium Designer because of its ease of use, consistent user interface, customizability and the ease of importing OrCAD® designs.”

Clint Cook
Electrical Engineer, Idaho Technologies