A quick review of 2 PCB design tools by Ted Mawson, Senior Designer with MB Electronic Design

Diptrace is a schematic capture and PCB design tool that I’ve been using for over 4 years now. I’ve also used Altium Designer for various clients but, given the choice, I prefer Diptrace.

There are things that Altium can do that Diptrace can’t but my gripe with Altium is that they keep adding whistles and bells to their product – such as HDL synthesis tools – without addressing simple shortcomings in their base product; it’s like having a Swiss Army knife: it’s got scissors, a file, a knife, etc.  but none of these are as good as a stand-alone equivalent and I don’t want to pay 10 times more just because all these things are packaged together and then be constrained to using the all-in-one tool. Here’s a few big things that push me towards Diptrace:

1. Cost

This is a quote from a 2013 Altium press release… “Altium Designer 14 pricing starts at $7,245 USD, including a one year subscription. Extended services and custom support packages are available from Altium..” My experience is that most users end up paying over $10,000 for a single user license that meets their needs and then, after the first year, there is a $2,500 per year maintenance fee required for support.

DIptrace costs $895 for the unlimited version, unlimited pins, unlimited layers.  There are no annual support costs for Diptrace – their support forum typically gives good feedback to your questions within 24 hours.

2.  Stability

OK, so I ‘hear’ you thinking, ‘Diptrace must be kinda flakey given it’s so much cheaper and Altium must be super-professional and stable; right?’  Wrong!

I have been using Diptrace for years on various PCs but mainly on Windows 7, 64 bit machines and I can tell you it is super-stable, there’s not many programs out there that you can say this about but Diptrace just doesn’t crash in my experience.

Two years ago I was trying to run Altium on a high-end Dell Latitude E6520, Windows  7, 64 bit, laptop with 8 Gigs of RAM and it would crash every day, sometimes losing the work I had done since my last save, sometimes even requiring a reboot.  I tried a different machine, same experience.  I called up Altium support who told me that I should try the in-version update to see if that cured the issues; problem: The annual maintenance contract had expired for the license I was using, ‘all’ I had to do is pay $2,500 and they would let me download the in-version update to see if that stopped Altium crashing.  It was then that I demonstrated Diptrace to the client who agreed that $895 for an unlimited forever license was a better proposition than $2,500 per year for a problem product; that client has gone on to use Diptrace for multiple designs and they are very happy with it.

3.  Usability

Inter-Sheet Connections   The latest Altium training notes state that ‘The only way to pass signals between sheets in a project is with net identifiers.’  Diptrace supports this with schematic-only net identifiers that you can put anywhere in any sheet but they also have cool bus features that Altium does not.

Example of Diptrace bus with page connector

Example of Diptrace bus with page connector

Busses   Busses were nothing but a graphical ‘feature’ in Altium until they recently added logical busses which appear to be restricted by the name you give the bus (such as D0..D7) but what do I do if I also want to add the net R/W to the bus?  This is clumsy at best and is a feature that the free Eagle CAD tool has had for years. Diptrace has busses nailed.  In Diptrace you can draw a bus, call it anything you want, then start drawing nets and, as you connect them to the bus, a pop-up asks if you want to create a new bus-net or connect to an existing bus-net with the full list displayed below.  Diptrace has a bus-page connector; hook one of these up to your bus and then copy that page connector to another sheet, draw a bus leading from it, and as you wire nets to the bus, the pop up gives you the same create-new-or-pick-from-a list view of nets in the bus, you can even do overscore bars to create read/not write (e.g. R/nW). This has additional value in that the verification tools will warn you if there is a net in a bus that only has 1 end connected. Neat.

Diptrace Pattern Editor

Diptrace Pattern Editor

Footprints   It’s true that Altium has a huge component library but the library editor is hard to work with.  Diptrace comes with a 120,000+ parts library that includes most devices and its pattern editor feature is so good that I can create a complex pattern such as this 325-pin BGA very easily.  When working with the latest components, it’s often the case that the footprints & patterns are not in your PCB tool library so it’s roll-your-own or stop work.  I also have run into issues where patterns are incorrect or lacking in some way, especially new ones.

Summary

Bigger and more expensive is not always better; I understand that Diptrace is growing in popularity and has some major users now, I can’t confirm but Microchip and Seagate were 2 names I heard.