Here’s something fun for a Friday: EMA has put together a video recap of the past 30 years of products designed with OrCAD, in commemoration of the PCB CAD tool’s 30th anniversary.
(We had one of those Polaroids and the Atari, by the way.)
Tag Archives: OrCad
Cadence: All Sync’d Up
Cadence today announced the release of point revisions to both Allegro and OrCAD, continuing its tradition of keeping releases of its major platforms in sync. They show significant upgrades in timing speeds and simulation speeds, respectively, as well as better use of state-of-the-art collaboration tools.
To the latter point, Hemant Shah, the product marketing manager for Allegro, says the point releases are a reflection of changes Cadence sees in the user base. ODMs are evolving to “parallelism,” he told me. “That’s where we learned the EDA tools were not designed for parallelism and needed to be rethought.” As a result, Cadence adopted Microsoft’s SharePoint collaboration tools, giving users a greater control over different versions and WIP design data management.
It was interesting to hear a major software vendor acknowledge that not everything developed in-house would or could be best in class. Likewise, Shah said that the company’s recent acquisition of Sigrity reaffirms the management’s commitment to the PCB space — something its competitors have questioned from time to time.
He added that the future releases leverage Sigrity’s power and SI technology across both the existing platforms and in Sigrity’s standalone products.
Sunstone’s ‘Fab’ Design Tool
Sunstone is again acting as much like a software company as it is a quickturn PCB fabricator.
The board shop, which over the past few years has developed and honed its free CAD/DfM tool known as PCB123, today rolled out a conversion tool that features native file upload functionality.
In short, customers no longer need to export data in Gerber; instead, they can use one of a series of native data formats, including Altium, Eagle, OrCad, NI, and others (including, of course, PCB123).
It’s the second big development by the PCB maker in the past year, having already rolled out a parts library addition to PCB123 that supports some 500,000 components.
PCB123 won’t replace the big ticket CAD suites, of course, but for the types of prototype boards most designers need, it keeps getting better and better. And with its CAD conversion capability, Sunstone further extends its “ease” factor to those who don’t use the company’s own software.