PCB Designs: A Simple Choice or Is There More to It?
The birth of any functional and reliable electrical device starts with an idea and its interpretation into an initial design. To implement such a design, whether schematic or layout, it is necessary to choose the appropriate design software. The right software plays an important role in creating efficient and reliable PCB designs, from the initial schematic to the final PCB layout. Choosing suitable tools and features can significantly influence the quality, accuracy and manufacturability of PCB designs.
Important Parameters of the Design System
What parameters should such software meet? In particular, it must contain all the basic functions needed to create clear schematics and components and enable the creation of a functional layout from the generated netlist. These functions are essential for creating reliable and efficient PCB designs. Furthermore, the software should provide different interface layouts for better clarity and more efficient work, as well as specific functions that visually and functionally differentiate individual design programs used for PCB designs.
Important Additional Features
When creating schematic wiring diagrams in the schematic editor, the design process remains similar from program to program. However, what differs is not only the visual aspect, but also the number of additional functions and how easily and conveniently the design can be transferred to the PCB layout environment. These capabilities can have a significant impact on the quality and efficiency of PCB designs.
Examples of such features include the flexibility of schematic symbols and their modification, formatting, alignment of text and components, so-called off-sheet interfaces, marking parameters in the schematic, and many others. In most cases, these functions are available in every program, but they are implemented differently or only in a limited form. The choice of the right software can therefore significantly influence how efficiently designers create and manage PCB designs.
Layout Creation
Layout creation, similar to schematic wiring, follows a comparable process from program to program. However, the available functions and their integration into the design environment directly influence the final PCB designs. In addition to basic functions such as trace routing, via placement, hole drilling and plane pouring, modern design environments offer specific features that support more advanced PCB designs.
These include via stitching, impedance matching, active BOM, design rule checking and many others that streamline the overall process and allow designers to create unconventional and more complex PCB designs.
These features, together with their proper implementation in the user interface, are often a deciding factor when choosing a particular design software. The most well-known and commonly used programs for creating PCB designs include Altium Designer, OrCAD, Eagle, KiCad, PADS, Allegro and EasyEDA. There are many other solutions available, but they often differ mainly in their interface, workflow and the way individual features are implemented.
Comparison of the Most Famous Design Programs
If you are deciding which design software is best suited to your needs, it is worth familiarizing yourself with the specifications, advantages and disadvantages of each solution. Let’s take a closer look at several widely used programs for schematic design and PCB designs.
Altium Designer
Of the professional design programs mentioned above, Altium Designer belongs to the higher-standard category. It is characterized by excellent compatibility, flexibility and smooth 3D visualization. The software offers a number of useful features, including hierarchical schematic design and layout tools, which can be essential when creating high-quality schematic designs and complex PCB designs. Thanks to its continuous development and improvements, it remains one of the most widely used design programs in the industry.
The most interesting enhancements, from my point of view, include cloud storage, which enables smoother teamwork on a single project and allows users to create shared components and libraries. Another important advantage is support for flex PCB design, which many other programs do not fully support. Altium Designer also makes complex PCB designs easier and more efficient through built-in tools for calculating differential pairs and intuitive routing.
OrCAD
The second widely used solution for professional designs is OrCAD, which is available with different levels of functionality, including OrCAD Standard, Professional and Allegro PCB. Its main advantages over Altium Designer are its price and more advanced SPICE simulation tools.
However, compared with Altium Designer, OrCAD has a less intuitive user interface and navigation. Its filtering options can also make it more difficult to quickly find and select the required elements. It also lags behind Altium in some areas of schematic and library editing and creation. Unlike Altium, it does not offer an active BOM feature that improves parts management and immediately verifies component availability with suppliers. This can be a significant advantage when managing larger numbers of projects and complex PCB designs.
Eagle
The third program, also used for professional designs, is Autodesk’s Eagle. Compared with the full version of Altium Designer, it is more affordable while offering functionality that is relatively close to OrCAD. It therefore has some of the same limitations when compared with Altium. Its cross-platform support allows it to be used with different operating systems. In terms of functionality, Eagle and OrCAD are relatively similar, but Eagle does not offer the same range of tools and simulation capabilities. Nevertheless, it can be a suitable solution for less demanding PCB designs.
Open-source software
Another group of programs that have recently received more and more attention are open-source programs with their own communities involved in further development and improvement of the program. A great representative of this category is KiCAD. Its main advantage is that it is free. This program has a large and active community behind it, which is constantly improving and adding features and creating various extensions to improve functionality.
But on the contrary, it has shortcomings in teamwork, clear and flexible user interface, cloud-based solutions, more challenging library creation and many more. For these reasons, KiCAD and other open-source design programs are not suitable for professional design. On the contrary, they are an excellent tool for beginners and amateur designers.
Selecting the Right Design System for PCB Designs
The design program and its selection for the user’s needs depends on the type of application, the required quality and also the experience of the designer. With the many types, varieties and variants of different programs, their flexibility with a combination of clear design can be considered as key features as decisive factors in selecting the right one. If the program meets the requirements for function, efficiency and quality of work, then the decision is left to price (Table 1.) and availability on the required operating system.
Table 1 – Comparison of the licence prices of the above-mentioned programs
In our workplace at ASN+, the development and creation of electrical systems are directly linked to the design environment. The quality and speed of our product development depends on the efficiency of the software, the necessary functions and the quality and clarity of the projects. Creation and versioning of libraries and projects, commenting and actual teamwork on projects – these are some examples of features and possibilities we must not miss in our development process.
To meet these requirements in our workplace, the design program Altium Designer was chosen to meet most of them. The detailed implementation into our development processes, the pros and cons of working with Altium and the reasons for choosing this program are discussed in more detail in our next article. How does it work for you? Which program suits the needs of your workplace? We would be happy if you could share your experience with us.