Also, we are happy to financially contribute towards KiCad development because we know it will not go towards bullshit designed to try to sell the company to a larger company (Altium tried to attract Autodesk, and failed -ADSK probably saw the mess AD had become and backed away).Īnyhow, I think KiCad is good for probably 95%, if not 99%, of any board anyone might want to design. We are not sorry at all that we made the change. As a result, AD is just piled-on with bugs, issues, inconsistencies and you can pretty much expect every single update to deliver new bugs.Īnyhow, we've done several boards with KiCAD.

In short, I got sick and tired of sending thousands of dollars per year to Altium for them to burn the cash adding cloud-based functionality nobody I know wants at all.

This after held licenses for AD going back to P-CAD days (2006, if I remember correctly) and previously using OrCAD and other professional tools. If one could easily make square via holes in PCB, those would be preferable for situations like grounding vias as they better terminate the EM wave.Īs soon as 6.0 was released we switched all future work to KiCad from Altium Designer. With a bunch of curves, you can’t do that, and it has to break those out for EM analysis. coupled transmission lines) which greatly speeds up the analysis.

When doing signal integrity analysis on PCB, the tools can break those long runs of straight, parallel lines into closed form models (i.e. Unlike DXF, it can’t handle a circle, so has to decimate it into a polygon. I’ll even round footprints to the nearest 25 um or larger.Īlso, the GDSII format for IC does not handle curves well. I do all my PCB layouts on a 0.1 mm grid and try to keep things snapped. Analyzing structures such as filters require high dynamic range, so adding a bunch of curved artwork will introduce errors in the simulation, or take much more resources.

For EM analysis, it actually helps to be “on grid” as the gridded solvers have a lot more dynamic range than gridless, like 100 dB more.

Kicad to altium conversion