OrCAD fun & games

[Brad Velander]

Joel,
not sure what features are available/supported through the CIS you
mention but Altium has recently made some rather large leaps with regards to
tying schematics (and now SCH symbol libraries) to external customer
controlled databases. With the new features you can build SCH symbol
libraires from external databases once the basic symbols have been created.
If I recall correctly that is essentially what CIS did, only I don't recall
if it did it to customer databases or something online and externally
controlled. I seem to recall people selling access/subscriptions to their
online CIS databases many years ago.

I don't currently use the latest Altium software but monitor their
NG/forum for the day that we do deploy the newer versions.

 

[PeteS]

Joel,
not sure what features are available/supported through the CIS you
mention but Altium has recently made some rather large leaps with regards to
tying schematics (and now SCH symbol libraries) to external customer
controlled databases. With the new features you can build SCH symbol
libraires from external databases once the basic symbols have been created.
If I recall correctly that is essentially what CIS did, only I don't recall
if it did it to customer databases or something online and externally
controlled. I seem to recall people selling access/subscriptions to their
online CIS databases many years ago.

I don't currently use the latest Altium software but monitor their
NG/forum for the day that we do deploy the newer versions.

CIS uses any ODBC compliant database for it's data. There were a few
really nice things about it

1. I could map (in an external database) a schematic part to a layout
footprint (which Allegro would pull in automagically when reading the
netlist)

2. We could set the status of a part to new, unkown, checked, approved
etc., and you could check all your parts from the Orcad menus - would
come up green, yellow or red depending on part status.

3. You could select 'database part' during capture so you always used
parts from the database, not the shipping orcad libs (which, because
they all hide the power pins, are pretty much useless without editing
in a non-trivial design)

4. It was very simple to replace a part just by highlighting and
right-click (such as if I stuck the wrong diode in or something - just
select the new part and off you go).

CIS is certainly a very good part of Orcad, although I'll admit there
are areas it's not as good

It's because of the control of used parts (and the fact one could only
use approved parts if set up that way) that many places still use
Orcad.

Cheers
PeteS

 

[qrk]

I haven't tried but just a few things with LTspice, though it seems
pretty robust. Actually I believe it does support BSIM3, but I'm not
sure.

[snippage]

Jim, There were BSIM3 (Level 7) models in the Polar Fab libraries that
we ran thru LTspice a couple years back. The version at the time
barfed on BSIM3. Mike E. fixed it on a Sunday after Hulmut S. figured
out the problem. I have found that LTspice has excellent compatibility
with PSpice syntax.

 

[Joel Kolstad]

Hi Brad,

not sure what features are available/supported through the CIS you
mention but Altium has recently made some rather large leaps with regards to
tying schematics (and now SCH symbol libraries) to external customer
controlled databases. With the new features you can build SCH symbol
libraires from external databases once the basic symbols have been created.
If I recall correctly that is essentially what CIS did, only I don't recall
if it did it to customer databases or something online and externally
controlled. I seem to recall people selling access/subscriptions to their
online CIS databases many years ago.

Essentially what CIS does is to provide a GUI-based front-end to a database
(pretty much any ODBC database -- you need no customize about a dozen lines of
script to connect it up to your particular database) that lets you browse and
search for parts based on their hierarchical categories, values, etc. (there
are many standard fields); it then selects a part from the symbol libraries
you have open and automatically files in all the attributes of that part with
the values from the database (part no, value, tolerance, vendor, internal part
no, etc. -- whatever fields you want).

Additionally you can take a part (or a bunch of parts) that's already been
placed on a schematic and "link" them to a database part, which simply looks
up the part in the database (by name) and pulls in all the attributes.

The on-line CIS databases (which now seem pretty much dead) were so that you
could search by, e.g., DigiKey part no. and get the part symbol & attributes
pulled in.

---Joel

 

[Brad Velander]

Joel,
Okay, sounds very similar to what Altium is now doing. Can't comment on
how easy it is to set up or how robust but I have been reading of a number
of users setting it up successfully in the past few months and then they
have helped a few others with problems/issues, possibly issues where they
didn't read the available white papers/instructions on how the set-up is
accomplished. You know the routine, why read anything when you can just type
a quick 1 minute email?

Of course Altium has been able to import data into schematic symbols
from external databases (DB3 or DB4 anyways) for many years now, I had
set-up a system to do it in P99SE back in 2000. I hear that the latest is
much more robust and simpler, I believe that it may also be using ODBC
databases as well.