Re: New query for low cost PCB CAD that *works*

Ian Bell wrote:

> OK, I checked with my old colleague. The one we chose but then went off was
> Veribest. The one we changed to was Protel.

Veribest was later renamed Mentor Expedition PCB.

It's remarkably powerful, but at the cost of intensive training. It's
probably overkill if you're not doing packed boards with 0402 passives,
BGAs on both sides, and 24 layers of impedance-matched traces.

I find Protel DXP and PCAD to both be very workable, although their
notions of libraries and design rules and other major features are very
different. Neither is inexpensive. Electronics Workbench Ultiboard
works, too (I have the 2001 version and haven't "upgraded"), although
its backannotation feature (changes from layout back to schematics) is
broken.

-a

.