PCB News - Discussion on PCB board routing tools

Last year's eda software ranking list, the top three were synopsys, cadence and mentor. Cadence is the boss, but he changed the one-time purchase of software to an annual license fee, which made the book income last year very ugly, but the income of cadence still reached 1.3 billion US dollars, only a little less than synopsys. Synopsys is mainly for ic design. If you are not doing ic production design, then the only software you are exposed to is part of the ip of synopsys in quartus, ise and other software, and you do not directly deal with this company.

In circuit board-level design software, the boss is cadence, the second is mentor, and the third is zuken. Altium (protel) ranks ominously and is estimated to be in the top 10.

Cadence's software is concepthdl/allegro and the acquired orcad. Allegro has been very popular recently, especially now that high value-added products such as computer motherboards and graphics cards are all in allegro format, although powerpcb was the industry standard three or five years ago.

Mentor's products are boardstation (en) and expeditionpcb (wg) and the acquired pads (powerpcb). en is the legendary PCB invincible master, those who only consider the construction period without considering the cost, always do the communication and military industry research special skills of 8 to 12 layers of PCB. Wg, it seems that all bbs agree that this is the best wiring tool on earth. Not to mention powerpcb, and many people use it.

Zuken's things are pws (stopped development), high-end cr5000 and low-end cadstar, but as far as I know, no one uses Zuken's software except for Japanese companies and companies that do business with Japan.

The above is an introduction to the discussion of PCB wiring tools. Ipcb is also provided to PCB manufacturers and PCB manufacturing technology.