Electrical Engineering & Electronics Design

I started working with Altium a few months ago. It's kind of complicated, especially because I do not understand English very much. But because of the fact that I was able to assimilate this software, I found it very good. Too bad he does not have Portuguese. I wish you had. But apart from that, what I think is best to work with is DipTrace. Of course with fewer features than Altium, but it completely satisfies my needs. Easy to handle and more straightforward tools without many clicks. Altium has the great advantage of working in conjunction with SolidWorks.

I think one of the main problems is the tutorials. They are more brief overviews rather than step by step guides. They seem to skip important steps and are more concerned with showing you what the software is capable of doing. Also I just don't like the library's for basic components,. They don't seem to have any intuitive structure to it. Mosfets , Transistors, Diodes, Resistors, etc... they are all just thrown in there. I can never seem to find what I need and the installed component library is so small with not many variety in components. I had to start importing library's straight away and then never seemed to find what I needed in them. It would just be brilliant if you could just click supplier link and download the entire component with footprint and 3d model but you have to find a component first with footprint from a library then attach that component to a supplier component number from the supplier link. RRRRRrrrrrrrr very frustrating but maybe it will make more sense when I get used to the software.

It is a professional level software I will keep chipping away at it.

SolidWorks PCB is only used with Altium CAE, so unless you are going to buy or use Altium for schematics and PCB layout, it is a forced CAE option.

SolidWorks PCB is the only real-time interactive bi-directional CAE to CAD program on the marketplace.

However, I own SolidWorks Professional which comes with CircuitWorks and although it is not real-time, it still performs the manual or batch-mode I need for Cadence Allegro.

If you work on many large complex designs within a large mulit-national corporation like Apple, GM, Boeing, or Intel, then it is a good choice.

But for occasional use where space analysis is not critical or with few iterations, CircuitWorks does the job just fine.

CircuitWorks will work with most other CAE PCB layout tools, but again is a manual mode tool.