Altium Vs Siemens PADS – A Detailed Comparison
What is the top PCB design software? This is a challenging subject that is frequently best answered by considering the type, complexity, and needs of the PCB being developed. Free PCB design software is best suited for simpler designs, students, and hobbyists. There are also premium tools, such as Altium Designer and Siemens PADS, that are significantly more robust and can handle more complex designs. Altium Vs Siemens PADS – which will be the best?
Which one will you choose to build your circuits with? Is PADS Professional or Altium Designer preferable? Let’s get to know one another better before we decide. As a result, you’ll be able to decide wisely.
About Siemens PADS
PADS is a PCB design software suite created by Mentor Graphics, which is now owned by Siemens. PADS Professional is a piece of PCB design software that is both powerful and easy to use, and it is utilized all over the world by engineers and small teams. With PADS, you can easily move your electronic designs from the conceptual stage through production inside a platform that is very user-friendly.
Features Of Siemens PADS
Xpedition Technology Foundation
Xpedition Enterprise is the most cutting-edge PCB design flow on the market. It offers integration from defining the system design to putting it into production. Because of its new technology, design cycles can be cut by 50% or more, and quality and use of resources can be greatly improved. Hardware engineers and small teams benefit from PADS Professional’s compatibility with Xpedition technology and enhanced teamwork for PCB engineering projects.
PADS Professional Cloud Apps
PADS Professional Cloud Apps facilitates digital transformation by bringing together component research, concept exploration, component sourcing, design and analysis management, and manufacturing in a flexible, cloud-based ecosystem.
Accelerating ECAD/MCAD Co-Design
Communicate design intent between electrical and mechanical CAD systems with speed and precision. With PADS Professional, both the PCB designer and the mechanical engineer may remain in sync by utilizing the greatest data interchange standards, making collaboration simple, accurate, and efficient.
Accelerating Time-to-Results with Routing Automation
Even for complex PCB designs, PADS Professional offers cutting-edge technologies that combine ease-of-use with highly automated PCB routing functionality to provide results that are high-quality and produced more quickly.
Design and Validate Complex Rigid-flex Structures
Design and validate complicated rigid-flex structures using PADS Professional’s correct-by-construction environment, which makes it easier to design complex rigid-flex stack-ups.
Design, Simulate, and Analyze Mixed-Technology Circuits
For analog/mixed-signal circuits, behavioral verification, scenario exploration, and component optimization are essential to assuring design intent, performance, and dependability.
Addressing High-Speed Challenges with Signal Integrity
Even in PCB design running at low operating frequencies, integrated circuit edge rates that are getting faster have negative high-speed impacts. Boards experience signal deterioration such as over/undershoot, ringing, glitching, crosstalk, and timing issues as these ICs switch more quickly.
Design For Manufacturing
PCB engineers can rapidly and completely find PCB fabrication and assembly issues with integrated design for manufacturing analysis before moving to manufacture, which reduces costs and delays.
PADS Professional RF Design
You may design, validate, and produce PCB-centric systems using the entire PADS Professional pipeline, including the construction of intelligent RF structures entirely within the tool set.
PADS Professional Resource Library
It is simpler to track part numbers, information, and more with PADS. The beginning library has more than 11,000 parts, a wide range of device types, and clear navigational partitions.
PADS Professional For Startup Companies
The PADS Professional for Startups program offers subsidized access to a full PCB design software solution, comprising schematic and layout with integrated design data management, component research, and real-time component sourcing expertise, to qualified startups.
About Altium Designer
Altium Designer System Engineering (SE) is a full-featured schematic editor with robust collaboration capabilities and a comprehensive collection of schematic capture tools for fast creating, editing, simulating, and documenting schematics. Altium provides a significantly more comprehensive collection of features and tools. It also has a highly user-friendly layout, which makes it simple to use, even for people who are just beginning their careers in the field. In addition to this, Altium offers superior customer service as well as extensive educational resources.
Features Of Altium
Cloud-Based Platform
Altium Designer, a cloud-based design and development application, enables users to work from any place. Because of this, anybody can access it from anywhere using the internet. Members of a project team can now develop and edit their projects remotely via the internet.
ECAD/MCAD Collaboration
Altium allows for ECAD/MCAD interoperability. This allows for synchronization with other CAD systems such as SOLIDWORKS, PTC Creo Parametric, Autodesk Inventor ect . It is one of the reasons Altium has become the best PCB design software available today.
Collaborate With Anyone
For engineers, time is an important commodity. You may save time by conducting design reviews with stakeholders’ feedback from any browser, on any device, with online collaboration.
Context-driven Comments
It is possible for users to submit comments to a document by highlighting problematic portions directly in the design. This gives users the ability to tag persons to resolve issues without having to exit the design environment.
Strong Supply Chain Management
Create a Bill Of Materials (BoM) for your project quickly and easily. It removes any possibility of mistake regarding the manufacturer. You will have access to all of the documentation pertaining to the manufacturing process in a centralized area, which will make doing so both quick and efficient.
Because of this, you will have an easier time producing a product that is successful. Because of this functionality, the user will have a tracking experience that is completely hassle-free.
Native 3D PCB Design
Make it possible for users to simulate a PCB design in three dimensions. The new technology assists you in determining whether or not your PCB will fit into the enclosure of the final product. This saves a ton of time and keeps expensive redesigns from having to be done. You will be able to validate your ideas and make adjustments before sending the boards off to be manufactured with the assistance of 3D PCB views.
Realistic Rigid-Flex
This function ensures that all of your mechanical needs, including those pertaining to three-dimensional components, case construction, and PCB clearances, are met in real time.
Multi-board Assembly
Gain an understanding of how the many architectural components of your product interact with one another in Native 3D, and easily test for compatibility and connectivity. Before moving on to a prototype, it is easy to spot any problems with the board and make the necessary repairs.
Schematic Capture
You may quickly record your needed design using a wide range of wiring tools, design verification, transparent netlist generation, and variation management.
Hierarchical & Multi-channel Design
Make sophisticated designs that are easy to navigate across all hierarchy levels, nets, and components.
Unified Library Management
Furthermore, the feature library has a variety of libraries that are collections of helpful components and models. This smart platform includes schematic symbols and PCB footprints, as well as lifespan status and supply chain planning, all in one place. All of this information, as well as collaboration capabilities for better project management and product development, is available to users.
Mixed Simulation
Customers can easily and precisely simulate designs in a sophisticated SPICE engine before making a final investment.
Board Layout
This will help you create the best layout possible. Altium Designer provides all of the control you might want in a single design environment, thanks to its advanced layer stack management, native 3D support, and complex controls like etch factor and surface roughness models.
Interactive Routing
With a high-performance engine that shows you how to route your designs in the best way possible.
High Speed & High-Density Design
You may easily construct high-speed electronics with a powerful tuning engine. Advanced pattern features, an EM solver for accurate propagation delay, impedance extraction, and simple HDI structure integration are supported by this feature.
Fabrication Drawings
You can produce clear fabrication views of your board and components with Draftsman by simply touching a few buttons.
Comparison Between Altium And Siemens PADS
Software for PCB design that is as feature-rich as Altium and Siemens PADS is the best that is currently available. However, we can only choose one of the two possibilities available to us. In that scenario, which of these programs for designing PCBs do you consider to be the most effective? It is a factor that contributes to the misunderstanding. To get a better understanding of this, let’s compare the two of them side by side. Let’s analyse Altium Vs Siemens PADS.
Extension For High-quality Fabrication And Assembly Drawing Creation
Draftsman is an advanced, yet user-friendly, drawing tool that is integrated into Altium Designer for the development of fabrication and assembly drawings. Draftsman is an integral extension that may be manually installed or deleted via the Extensions and Updates tab. The Extensions and Updates page can be accessed by clicking the user icon in the Altium Designer window. The Siemens PADS software does not provide this feature.
High Speed Design And Rigid-flex Design Features Included In Standard License
The goal of the design and layout of high-speed printed circuit boards (PCBs) is to produce circuit board designs that are less vulnerable to issues with signal integrity, power integrity, and EMI/EMC. This particular category of designs refers to the kinds of systems that transmit data from one component to another using high-speed digital signals.
A large number of electronic devices do not reside on a single printed circuit board. Flex and rigid-flex PCBs are used to connect several rigid PCBs into a single unit. This enables PCB designers to tailor their boards to unusual enclosures, incorporate motion into novel devices, and give unique form factors that rigid boards cannot.
The primary advantage of Altium is that their Standard license includes both rigid-flex design and high speed design characteristics. Only the PADS Professional package from Siemens offers the rigid-flex feature; the PADS Standard or Plus versions do not.
Quickly Generate ECOs, Reports And Documentation
The list of all modifications needed to execute changes to one or more design documents in order to synchronize those documents is known as an engineering change order (ECO). You can choose which modification types can be included when an Engineering Change Order (ECO) is generated based on differences discovered by the Comparator by using the ECO Generation tab of the Project Options dialog. Additionally, Altium offers efficient ways to create a variety of reports and documentations in faster ways.
Although Siemens PADS has the capability to generate reports and documentation, it is not nearly as effective as Altium in this regard.
Component And BOM Management Features With Real-time Supply Chain Data
Altium offers functionality for managing components and bills of materials (BOM), along with real-time data from supply chains. However, Siemens offers some supply chain functions as part of their PADS Professional plan, which comes with an additional add-on that costs an additional charge each month.
Ease Of Use
When compared to Siemens PADS, Altium offers a superior level of use due to its intuitive interface.
Pricing
Altium is a more affordable option than Siemens PADS. In addition to this, additional fees will be assessed for the use of features such as BOM in PADS Professional.
Features
In comparison to Siemens PADS, Altium provides access to a greater quantity and quality of features. The regular subscription of Altium Designer includes access to the vast majority of the program’s functionality. However, in the case of PADS, the most important capabilities can only be accessed by purchasing the PADS Professional Program.
Library
The number of resources offered by Altium is superior to those provided by Siemens PADS. In addition, the availability of Octopart elevates Altium to the dominant position.
Through Altium Designer’s integration with Octopart, users have access to the component data they require in order to make wise decisions. Over 61 million different components found on Octopart, that are all linked directly to electronic distributors and have stock, pricing, and lifecycle status information that is updated every day.
Summary
Which one do you decide to go with? Altium Designer or Siemens PADS? It is entirely dependent on one’s own preferences. However, it is essential to arrive at a defensible conclusion in order to produce an impeccable electronic design. Although they are both good pieces of software, in terms of functionality, cost, and overall quality, Altium is the superior option.
