At 02:57 PM 10/17/00 -0700, you wrote:
At 12:35 PM 10/17/00 -0700, Drew Lundsten
wrote:
About the only thing I have seen in Orcad that
I wish I had in Protel is the
off-sheet port symbol which shows the sheet to which the port runs. It's
a
Shazam! In Schematic, under Reports, "Add Port
References."
Yes Protel does but you cannot move them or change their fonts.
Take a look at Aspiring Technology's free server for this. Works even
better but has one problem I can live with for free. It puts the
reference to far away in some instances. I just move them to where I want
them.
www.aspiring-tech.com
little bit at
odds with the Protel sheet hierarchy, but is there a way to do
this in Protel (99SE) that I'm just not aware of? For lack of a
better
method we seem to be running all ports up to the parent sheet and back
down
onto another child sheet, i.e. when a signal from one sheet has to go to
a
connector on another sheet.
That's not a bad way, however; it forces a certain intersheet discipline.
This way becomes essentially with schematic re-use, where nets of the
same name (but not to be connected) may exist on different sheets. I'd
mention some OrCAD schematics I had to work with which had been put
together like this, but the trauma was just too great.
btw after a near brush with death-by-PADS I'm
beginning to accept the
apparent consensus on this reflector - Protel could quite easily
dislodge
the reigning king.
Well, the king is Cadence, with Mentor close. I'm not quite sure how CAD
rankings go, whether it is based on number of seats or total sales
revenue, but my understanding is that Protel/Accel is roughly equal to
PADS. But since the Protel tool is much less expensive than the
comparable PADS tool, I'd think that Protel has many more seats; and my
experience selling design here in the U.S. backs that up. *Lots* of small
companies have Protel; it was by far the number one system in terms of
number of companies. But each of these companies, typically, had one
seat; whereas Cadence, for example, sells to larger companies with many
seats. Plus those seats are, what?, $30,000? (There is now Allegro
Workstation, at $10K, which is a somewhat crippled version. And, of
course, Cadence owns OrCAD.)
PADS has just been bought by Innoveda (formerly Viewlogic). Comparing the
purchase price of PADS with the market capitalization of Protel, Protel
is by far larger. Innoveda's purchase price, $2 million in cash plus 6.5
million shares of Innoveda stock and Innoveda assumed $7.4 million of
existing PADS debt. The whole deal was valued at $32 million on the PADS
web site. I looked up the market capitalization of Innoveda; with the
stock at 2.94 per share, down from 7.5 at the IPO, if I read the charts
right, the capitalization of Innoveda is $96.2 million. Compare this with
the market capitalization of Protel Australia, $196.34 million (in U.S.
dollars). Protel's IPO was at $3 (Aus.), it is presently selling at $5
(Aus). Protel stock is generally a recommended buy. The price/earnings
ratio for Protel is 41, whereas Innoveda is a negative 14.
If you don't know what these numbers mean, the summary is: if you bought
Innoveda stock a while ago when it was first issued, you are regretting
it and are uncertain about what is coming next, and if you bought Protel
stock at the IPO, you are fat and happy and looking to even better
returns in the future.
No question about it: the market thinks that Protel is the winner, even
against the new Innoveda, which does not look strong at all. I have a
client using Viewlogic. The engineers are not happy with it, and are
trying to convince management to use Protel tools. Management is
reluctant to admit that they made an expensive mistake buying
Viewlogic.... That kind of inertia is good news for Innoveda, but I'd
hate to be staking my future on it!
Sure, we can design boards in Protel from Viewlogic schematics (and do,
of course: this is, after all, my client!). But it's not the best way to
go, and Viewlogic/PADS would be no better. Of course, I'm sure that
Viewlogic will act to bring the tools closer together, but Protel has an
integrated solution NOW, and for a much lower cost.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why Protel might have an
advantage. Bottom line: programmer salaries are not as high in Australia
as in the U.S., but the quality of work is not inferior. There are other
non-U.S. companies, but they have not been able to penetrate the U.S.
market as extensively as has Protel.
marjan@vom.com
Abdulrahman Lomax
P.O. Box 690
El Verano, CA 95433
*
Rusty Garfield
Development Technician III
Sugar Land Product Center
(281) 285-7611 (voice)
(281) 285-7619 (fax)
garfield@sugar-land.spc.slb.com (e-mail)
