A good amount of freelancers splurge on Altium because it’s what they already know.

Because of that it’s also the package that many new freelance engineers are most familiar. It’s good software, but that’s pretty crazy.Īltium is the most popular PCB design package among those with a company’s budget behind them. Get your FREE Ultimate Guide - How to Develop Your New Electronic Hardware ProductĪltium Designer is considered the Ferrari of PCB design packages and starts at over $7,000! No that is not a typo. Although I’m a biased fan of DipTrace, you’ll learn it’s not the best option for everyone. Instead, I wrote this article to share my own experiences. There are many packages not discussed in this article because I’ve never personally used them. However, for hardware entrepreneurs, startups and makers I prefer a less well-known PCB design packaged called DipTrace.ĭisclaimer: This article is not intended to be an unbiased review of every PCB design package available. That being said, there are three PCB design packages that tend to be the most popular and considered the best: Altium Designer, Eagle, and OrCad.

I think prior versions did NOT have this problem, otherwise I'd not suddenly have all these vendor reported problems today in the first board I released after moving to the latest version.There are numerous software packages available for designing printed circuit boards (PCBs), too many in fact. And Diptrace doesn't flag this as a violation either. Or you can remove islands.īut on a complicated board, it's hard to find these problems manually.

Obviously, If you know about this, you can adjust the fill parameters to ensure the fill makes it around. The DFM software correctly flags this as a clearance problem. In the attached, you can see the gap that is left. The bug is easy to reproduce: Bring a trace and via close to each other so that the fill can't make it all the way around a via. I'm using 4.3.0.2, and a board that was submitted today had a lot of errors related to fill as reported by the vendor.

Diptrace pcb