(C’mon, you knew I was gonna say ‘Well let me count the ways‘, didn’t you?
All the outrage that follows is couched in light of the limitations of the WordPress interface.
Wordpress is free, so they aren’t disrespecting their customers every moment of every day and
charging them thousands of dollars for it).
So, I’ve been fighting with Mentor Graphics’ DX Designer for the last week or so. I’d been using Altium Designer previously (and giving them Hell about minor issues, honestly), but the company decided to standardize on Mentor Graphics for PCB design.
I have to say, compared to Altium, using the Mentor Graphics “PADSFlow” (or ‘PADSFlaw‘ as I like to call their abysmal constellation of half-assed software) is like trying to teach a pig to whistle. The Mentor Graphics product really SUCKS and they know it well (because that is self-evident & I’ve told them so in detail). I want to share my opinions about it with you (whoever “you” are). Jesus H. Christ, I get a better user experience with CadSoft EAGLE, the pencil and quadrille paper I was designing with 30 years ago, or even the 80′s version of “HiWire” (the very first CAD I ever used). I could deal with a Windows 3.1 level of user interface, even a DOS 5.0 user interface, but with DX Designer I feel like my productivity would be better if I was actually PISSING my designs into a snowbank.
The DX Designer user interface is either un-evolved or just plain insulting for starters. Half of the time when I click on the “Help” button it will crash the application, and the times that it doesn’t the information you need is just not there. Don’t EVEN bother with the vestigial context-sensitive help icon, it will just open a browser window that tells you to look somewhere else for information. (This “feature” alone puts Mentor Graphics at the top of my list of nominees for “Death by Mass Rabid Weasel Attack”). It’s reminiscent of the scene in “Office Space” where they guys are trying to figure out how to launder money by looking up the definition in the dictionary; they found words but not answers.
If you are trying to manipulate a component on a sheet of your schematic but need to rotate it, you’ll need to open a pop-up menu for that component by clicking on one of the pixel-width lines within the component to open the window. This will likely take you several tries (and that’s after you manage to zoom in on the component, more on that later). If you are lucky enough to get that darned menu open, then you get to select the “Transform” option, then the “Rotate CCW” option, which will rotate it 90 degrees. Boy, that sure makes more sense than having a hot-key and a smart selection routine that will grab the component when you click inside its boundary and then rotate it 90 degrees, doesn’t it? (Please say ‘no’, so the righteous chain-whipping can begin in earnest).
Oh, you’d actually like to connect some components with lines (AKA ‘nets’)? Here’s another really kludgey part of DX Designer: component pins had better be three grid increments apart or you are going to see your nets do some pretty weird snake-dances on the way (and then they will probably still evaporate like Karl Rove’s wet-dream of a permanent Republican majority after your terminating mouse-click). Every pin seems to have this mysterious 3-grid “line of death or disfigurement” around it. Kiss-off your hopes of making a fairly compact-yet-clear schematic in DX Designer or get ready to do the Snake Dance! (This alone merits the “The Angry Mobs Decapitated Me” dis-merit badge for whoever made this the Mentor Graphics cannon).
Of course, to make a connection you have to be able to see a pin or endpoint clearly, and if, like me, you are working on some middlin’ complex stuff you’ll be needing to zoom in and zoom out at specific points of interest. Well, DX Designer makes this a “Thing of the Future” by defining “zoom” to mean “zoom to center of sheet”. Positioning your mouse and using the scroll button gets you a well tempered finger (from Mentor Graphics) rather than a clear view of the circuit element you want to see! You are going to have to zoom in a little, then fiddle with the scroll bars at the right & bottom of the window, DC al coda.
Say you are working on a banked memory subsystem, with, say 16 each address and data lines (global signals) going to say 8 identical memory devices. Can you do it one time, then paste copies of all the nets and labels on each memory device? Not well or easily, unless you copy them off a different page because the idiot DxD product deletes the “global” attribute when you do this within the same page. Lets count it up: 8 devices times 32 connection, times 4 mouse-clicks to access the local/global ticky-box = carpal tunnel syndrome, high blood-pressure, eye-strain and justifiable homicide.
As Ed Hurlihy would put it: “Time is on the competition’s side when you use DX Designer by Mentor Graphics!”.
Don’t even get me started about the friggin’ “pin files”, the bizarre “HETERO” settings or having to open symbols in MS Word to manually correct bogus default settings and such, the whole “get used to clicking on every signal on your schematic at least 10 times” or the “well, the ‘save + check’ function just barfed a lot of errors, but the error messages in the little window aren’t linked in any way to the general region of the ‘note’, ‘warning’ or ‘error’ (so if DX is whining about something related to an oftentimes irrational default / invisible attribute conflict you don’t have a prayer of making use of the worthless Mentor Graphics product to find it).
Mentor Graphics is just a waste of time, spontaneously trashing designs.
Hint: if DX Designer decides to screw up what you are doing…. just delete all the connections, labels and properties you can, then start over again (and again and again…) — it will take less time than finding the source of the problem {eg, your initial purchase decision} and correcting it.
DX Designer is the least capable and most infuriating schematic capture system I’ve used since 1982, bar none. If you see it coming at you, SHOOT TO KILL or it will steal all your ‘essence’, defile your women, stampede your cattle and give you the Clap. Yes, DX Designer is that unclean.
At several thousand bucks per seat and in light of the ‘issues’ built into the product (and I can only conclude it was with malice aforethought), if you don’t end up wanting to sue these bastards for gross negligence and misrepresentation, you deserve every bit of malfunction you’ve paid for (Duwane, I hope you are reading this!).
Mentor Graphics should be debarred from selling inside the USA just on the basis of the lack of a usable help system (it sucks so bad only to encourage you to buy their “training seminars” is my guess), the finicky non-response to selecting a net, bus or component, the poorly documented features (like refusing to recognize lower case pin numbers), the really cool way their software crashes leaving your design in ruins and their contemptuous license system (you want to be able to actually look at your CAM output… well, that’s an additional charge, you understand! Sure, Pads can place/orient parts on a radial grid… but only one at a time, unless you give us even more money… and the blood of virgins, MWUAHAHAHAHAHA!).
Mentor Graphics as a whole, and DX Designer in specific, is either an EPIC FAIL or an EPIC ABUSE (or a continuing criminal enterprise), I can’t decide which. It is hard to imagine this level of incompetent applications programming (after all these years), the product’s user unfriendliness and unwieldiness and the level of corporate “up yours, Bud” attitude that this product radiates as being anything except an embodiment of everything that’s going wrong in America right now. Bring in the guillotines!
Does Mentor hire anyone that’s NOT a psychopath bent on destruction? Companies that put out this kind of excrement need to be shut down and their executives and managers blacklisted. This gang has turned a once pretty okay product into crap, and nobody should pay them to do that again: they should be sentenced to screwing up orders in a fast food restaurant where the angry customers can call them personally to task for their sins, forever and ever amen!
If Mentor Graphics was located in my city, their executives and managers might suffer a much higher than normal rate of unfortunate “accidents” involving falling masonry, flammable substances or large object forcibly inserted into their rectums (as a warning to all who dare follow the ‘Mentor Graphics path to the Dark Side’). These kind of sub-humans need to have their birth certificates savagely revoked: they steal from all Humanity, even while knowing better. At this moment Mentor Graphics pisses me off even more than what’s left of the GOP KoolAid mixer/drinkers, the Birthers, the Birchers, the Klan and all those other of wastes of protein: fuck’em all unto death, I say!
Don’t waste your money or time using Mentor Graphics products, gang! Save yourself a lot of aggravation by sticking to almost any other product on the market: it will be just as capable (if not more so) and lots less buggy… or wait for the wintertime, drink a lot of coffee and get your aim honed for action. You’ll be glad you did.
Some free advertising copy for Mentor Graphics and their DX Designer ( I hearby formally and legally renounce to all parties and for all time the use of the following text by anyone including Mentor Graphics (may their nipples crumble into crusty bits in very public places and to their great displeasure, just because they deserve it for vending such UTTER CRAP as USABLE PRODUCT, PraiseBob!):
- Mentor Graphics: more SUCK for the buck!
- I just love not being able to zoom to a selected location by default, that’s why I use DxD!
- DxD: Couldn’t we have beaten the ‘outsourced’ people harder to get a useful product?
- DxD: where even clicking on ‘Help’ can crash your system
- Dude, it’s totally ‘rad’ and ‘totally random’: DxDesigner!
- You’ve got time to guess for a living: DxDesigner!
- Tear up your work and do it over again because you use Dx Designer!
- DxDesigner, from Mentor Graphics… because the other packages enhance productivity!
- You don’t hate life enough? Try DxDesigner by Mentor Graphics, it’s ‘Craptastic©‘!
- Death by a thousand mouse-clicks: Dx Designer?
- When I deleted this component all the buses and signals disappeared, too! Dx Designer will blow you away!
August 15, 2009 at 1:37 pm |
Your ability to string together prose into an entertaining tirade is truly splendid. Magical composition of fluid emotion!
While I would never state that DxDesigner is “bug free” or “perfect” (I have not found that s/w yet…. including WordPress… and I do love WordPress) I will challenge your alleged “facts”.
The only issue I see is that your “facts” are simply wrong:
1) Rotate Component: “Cntrl+Shift+R”
2) I routinely create designs with pins on .1″ grids and no problems.
3) Zoom — mouse wheel, in and out… very natural and I have one of those new fangled mice where the mouse wheel tilts left and right — and the schematic page pans left and right.
4) I have not needed to edit a symbol in a text editor yet, I use the symbol editor. Andy while there are times where I would prefer an “in situ” symbol editor the automatic seeding from DxDesigner to the Symbol Editor and then auto-update from the symbol editor to DxDesigner is extremely productive (no design re-load or refresh).
5) I did loose a design but it was to a disk crash and not the result of some malicious DxDesigner manager’s desire to limit engineering productivity (although, that was my first guess… The disk was on the edge of going out so it was a little tricky to find the root cause). I have been using DxDesigner for years and aside from the disk crash I have not lost a single design.
6) I do think your comments about the help system must be dead on — or you would not have listed the first 5 false facts. Of course, to claim that Mentor Graphics is unique in this respect does make this false fact #6. I suggest picking up the phone and calling Mentor Graphics Customer Support — you would have had all of your answers in less time than it took to write your post.
There are other non-Mentor sources of insight into how to trounce the competition with your incredible design skills and productivity wielding the mighty DxDesigner light-sword…. but I would never suggest Google (or any other search engine).
I always believed that folks who respond to “rant posts” with the “read the manual” acronym are completely missing the point. I have never read a manual, don’t use the help files but I do have that antiquated instrument — the phone — updated with a headset and I dial my trusty customer support engineers and voila — don’t need no stinking manual or training classes. If you had worked with the customer support engineers at Mentor Graphics you would have written a completely different article —- how wonderful it is to find a company who has not outsourced their customer support.
I do understand how frustrating it is to adopt a new tool-set after your tool selection recommendations have been ignored. However, you have chosen one of the most bizarre methods I have seen to date to ask for help. Is this a desperate plea to join the unemployed? There are many thousands of companies — and countless engineers using DxDesigner to create market dominating products today and you are raising your hand and saying “not me”. (I would caution against that approach — there are many very good engineers inhabiting the unemployment ranks due to no fault of their own)
I just did a quick search of the DxDesigner documentation and all of the “answers” were easy to find (well, not the disk crash – data corruption but my boss expects me to have those hardware diagnostic skills — they also did NOT mention that they think their own help system “sucks” but I find that understandable). I think you have walked out onto the thin ice and while I do applaud the vivid imagery and tightly coupled metaphors you might want to head back to shore now.
Normally, I do not respond to anti-DxDesigner rants… I just enjoy the knowledge that my job security is increased with every company who believes that “toys” are superior to hard core engineering tools. I love it when our competitors think they will save a few bucks and leverage these lost cause solutions… they are just giving us the opportunity increase our market share. Of course, I also believe it is not the “tools” it is the creativity, intellect, experience and dedication of the “engineers” that determine competitive success… but I do like to have a sharp axe when cutting down a tree.
I expect this comment will not be published or you will delete it soon as your rant is more emotional than factual. It does not bother me…. the more people you scare off to the “toys” the better it is for those of us who harness the power of DxDesigner.
However, if you have calmed down now and want to contribute your learning experiences to the improvement of Mentor Graphics for the benefit of the larger engineering community… I suggest a quick Google for “Ask Andy Mentor Graphics” and send Mentor Graphics Management some constructive input (How weird is that, Mentor Graphics management openly discussing their business on the web and taking questions from anyone??)
August 15, 2009 at 5:38 pm |
Grizz-
Thanks for the information I’ve been unable to extract from the package provided by Mentor Graphics! It’s truly appreciated! Hyperbolic invective is indeed (sadly) a declining art-form, bemoaned by Mark Twain a century ago: thanks for your comments on that as well!
Many, many people do use and enjoy DxD… but I remain in the “wholly crap” camp.
Like you, I don’t have time to wade through docs if I can avoid it, but if they are readily available and reasonably well organized and not choked with references to non-existent/non-license enabled/irrelevant or wholly obfuscated rabbit trails to nowhere… we can generally distill ‘meaning’ from raw data.
Still, if a ‘help system’ doesn’t describe the most basic operations of a product, isn’t this more a failure of the of the software producer than a fault of the end user (who admittedly is more comfortable with at least one competing product).
I mean, crikies! Is this a safari into the darkest jungle or an honest business transaction? Do you pay for what you reasonably expect and then get those features, or are you expected to make a lifestyle change that requires re-training and re-education to make use of the product?
Why would any product require a phone-bank of engineers to interpret what should be in the well-indexed documentation… unless they were SCREWING THINGS UP, BIGTIME???
It is a bar of product utility that MG has not met.
I know it CAN be done because it HAS been done, but not by Mentor Graphics!
It is not a value-neutral “feature”, for example, that pin numbers MUST be in upper-case ONLY. Pin names are FORCED into upper case numbers but pin numbers are not, even though it’s a ‘halt and catch fire’ condition!! If it is a REQUIREMENT it should be REQUIRED at time of input, right? Basic ‘sanity checking’ of input is missing from the MG product, days are wasted, deadlines blown….
I maintain my skepticism about the value of the MG product over little, basic, canonical things like this.
This is where the external text editor comes in: to fix many hours of component creation in the native “Component Wizard” that DOESN’T force pin numbers to the required upper case.
Thank goodness you knew better! We returning users are given no such guidance until a lot of time is wasted utterly by BAD DOCUMENTATION and BAD PROGRAMMING in the Mentor Graphics product!
Maybe my expectations fpe CAE packages has risen beyond what MG choses to deliver… but in real terms they must either “get it up” or GET OUT OF THE BIZ or just quit their whining: that’s what I’m saying.
A commoditized tool (like a hammer or a CAD/CAM package) should be useful without a “non-help system”, a “SupportNet”, a phone-bank, a training seminar or the interference of a multitiered license system that denies access to reasonable and ordinary functions within the core product as purchased (like viewing CAM outputs without the payment of additional tribute, etc… ‘Oh, you wanted a non-opaque windshield on the car… that’s an up-charge!’).
Yeah, I’ve got 3rd party CAM viewers on my system, but what a PISSANT CORPORATE MOVE IT IS TO CHARGE MORE FOR THAT FEATURE!!! C’mon, just how pathetic can things get? Do the fast-food establishments in your neck of the woods withhold ketchup unless you ask for it? An order for ‘French fries’ implies ketchup, FUCK your little laminated signs to the contrary! I drive around and cut off other customers just to address this ‘corporate policy’ all the time… because it is stupid and it SUCKS!
‘Caveat emptor’, I’m down with that and all but requiring a frigging’ lawyer to scrutinize every aspect of a software license terms is kind of extreme, dontcha think? It strikes me as “bizarre” to think so, but maybe your boss has much deeper pockets than mine.
This is the bone of contention and the challenge that Mentor Graphic has not met:
DESPITE never having used the Altium package before (never even HEARD of Altium, in fact, since I’d been walking the Earth as a Tech Writer for a few years, vagaries of the local economy and all), I was able to to have completed boards for a high-speed multi-channel analog data acquisition system (0.75 inch wide, 17 point something inch diameter, semi-circular, 8-layer boards plotted on a radial grid) in hand and WORKING in less than a month after first use: no phone-bank use, no training seminars, no printed manual required… because most of the software ‘quirks’ and ‘kinks’ made sense!
And seriously: “I do think your comments about the help system must be dead on — or you would not have listed the first 5 false facts”…. Umm, did you parse that statement fully before you typed it?
Likewise: “Of course, to claim that Mentor Graphics is unique in this respect does make this false fact #6″…. I don’t think I’ve ever claimed that Mentor Graphics is the only ball-less corporation foisting inadequate product(s) onto customers, but feel free to provide a quote that says otherwise. I’ll publish it, promise!
Grizz: are you smoking something that I’m not, or, in your zeal to defend mentor Graphics are you just failing to make your point well? Hey, I love you, man… but WTF?
I’m all in: corporations more dedicated to “stockholder return” than “service to customers” are just WRONG and making customers pay (monetarily or temporally) for their “wrong-think” or lack of competence is just plain stupid. Likewise,if they are that lame as to steal from their stockholders the cost of running a phone-room to offset the bullshit nature of their documentation, aren’t the just as worthy of the noose?
While “You can’t fix stupid”, you CAN expose and punish promulgators of “Stupid” to the point that they “learn not to burn” (as in ‘not burning customers’). Hello, Mentor Graphics! Are you understanding the words that are coming out of my mouth??!!!
A simple plan: fire the execs and managers, listen to the engineers and prosper (to paraphrase Mr. Spock). ‘Suits’ make GREAT underwater decor, especially in the coastal waters of the North-West (or so I hear in land-locked Oklahoma).
‘Nit-picking’ (or even calling to corporate attention their lack of adherence to self-evident human interface, documentation, data entry and product usability issues) isn’t my favorite thing to do (hey, I’m spending my off-time on this, after all): I’d prefer a world of well-thought out and delivered product functionality. I could do WITHOUT needless irritation and recursive rework required by DxD.
I’m an ‘if you open a gate, you close it’, ‘if you open a file, write to it then close it’, ‘if you sell a product, you make sure it works well first’ and ‘if it is a data format requirement, you enforce it at time of input or just convert it to the required format automatically’ (like they used to teach in ‘Computer Programming 101′, back in the early ’80s) kind of guy.
Confronted by the “It’s a large pond full of brain-damaged frogs” and/or “Everyone else is delivering substandard products” arguments— I say “BAH! OFF WITH THEIR GENITALIA! All their villages will SUFFER for this INSOLENCE, as a warning to the others!”. Even primitive hunter-gatherers knew to not propagate under-performing livestock. Why should we ‘sophisticated’ modern humans forget this lesson?
I’m frequently told that the MG layout editor is much less frustrating than DxD would lead me to expect, but I may never know since for the last week I’ve been having to recursively delete and re-perform basic designs and tasks in DxD. MG’s ignoring of basic programming tenets is a VERY major barrier for me overcome before I can encourage others to adopt their package.
Right now, even if I were heavily pressed by the school ‘Athletic Booster Club’ to upgrade my impression for ‘Mentor Graphics Dx Designer’ to save the Varsity Football program in my district, I’d maybe sign off on a C-/D+ grade (which is officially ‘passing’), but with some serious text in the ‘Teacher Comments” portion of the Report Card. For college level work, I’d say “thanks for trying, but you ignored basic and well-established rules of programming; I’m sure it was an ‘executive decision’ but you are stuck with the ‘suck’ for it”. and send a brochure for a local trade school to the parents (no shame in this, not everyone is ‘Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds’). The pin number/pin name filter screw-up (avoidable by conventional wisdom and good programming technique) would merit a “thanks for trying” grade (aren’t you glad I wasn’t at your college?).
I’m ‘cruel but fair’ in this respect and not a shill for any brand of CAE/CAD/CAM: I just want whatever is sold to work per reasonable expectations… and believe strongly that ‘failures to advance’ over ‘N’ consecutive years is a sign that not only is a firm not learning but is either incapable or opposed to learning… or just hooked on screwing the customer & shareholders due to a lack of desire to fulfill their end of the social contract…
“Bring in the guillotines!”
August 16, 2009 at 4:38 am |
Like I said… It’s not perfect and I think you have valid points to make. It’s the cyclone of escalating from frustration to condemnation that is difficult to reconcile.
There is nothing easier to use than what you already know — that’s simple.
Does DxDesigner offer superior productivity? I believe the answer is a definite “Yes” but obtaining the prerequisite knowledge is not addressed by my statement. Clearly, if Mentor Graphics is to be successful expanding their customer base beyond their current users they really should heed your feedback.
My subtle point is that unless you provide that feedback they will not have the opportunity to improve. (While improving the documentation based on your feedback will not address the learning curve challenges for you, the customer support option could be your tactical solution)
Who knows, maybe their management team is reading your blog and is currently making preparations… There is one way to be certain.
Given that users of DxDesigner are at different stages of knowledge if I were asked whether the priority should be placed on improving the “out of the box” documentation or innovating to provide role & flow based version management I would select the later. No disrespect intended but I have my own agenda.
I am not convinced the challenge is with “evil management” as much as it is with providing technical evolution to meet current designers needs. I will reiterate…. I do think you have made valid points that could cause a priority shift. However, if that priority shift is made it will clearly be made by a bean counter manager to address business objectives… I can’t imagine a software developer would make that choice as they would naturally prefer creating “new functionality” over documenting functionality.
Yes, around here you don’t get the ketchup unless you ask for it. Annoying but I have adjusted to asking for the ketchup at the same time I make my payment (and I do agree that the penny pinching had caused an un-needed behavioral change).
I am under constant pressure to complete my designs faster while at the same time reducing the component and manufacturing costs… seems like everyone is caught in the same economic wave. Heck, my favorite sandwich shop has made a customer satisfaction blunder… they chose to lower the cost and deliver a thinner sandwich when I would have paid more for that toasted piece of heaven I loved (I stopped eating lunch there…. just pissed me off — I did raise the issue to the owner of the chain store I frequent and when I was told it was a corporate decision I made my decision).
Isn’t there a deeper question: what caused the economic upheaval that is driving all of this nickle and dime behavior? Without diving into politics too far I think the root cause is with the bankers and I am all for auditing the Federal Reserve (If there is something worth boiling my blood over, I think that is getting close to the right domain).
Am I a blinded DxDesigner advocate?… I will admit there is a possibility. I am not a young dog and I have used almost every EDA solution available (and some that are no longer available). Maybe I like DxDesigner because “it is what I know” but I believe the answer is deeper…. DxDesigner is not stagnant… it continues to evolve to help meet the productivity, first pass design success and cost control pressures that I am challenged with. The constant innovation has caused a few foul words to spill but at the same time it has saved my hind quarters numerous times.
The reality is that if I were truly acting in my own selfish interests I would not have responded… you might reset priorities away from my innovation requirements. You might have convinced our competitors to stay away from DxDesigner and we would have had another competitive edge.
My solution is very much like the ketchup — When I really need to know and the solution is not obvious I just call customer support.
I stumbled across your blog while I was searching for some tech. tips to help me with a current design. It is unusual to find an engineer with excellent writing skills… rare enough and poignant enough to cause me to pause and respond. I hesitate to cause reflection and a reversal of sentiment (as you might be working for one of our competitors) but I also love a good debate. It’s been fun.
Peace.
August 16, 2009 at 8:14 am |
Griz-
One of the anarchist ‘zines I read/write for has featured a series on the “tramp pressmen” of days gone by. I feel a kinship in this respect as a jockey of EDA packages.
There can be no doubt that we are not competitors.
Your insights/comments have great intrinsic value.
December 7, 2009 at 8:06 am |
I agree so much with the first post, I used the old Mentor “Neted” product in the past and loved it. Thats why we chose Mentor’s DXDesigner – what a mistake. Why did they do it when there are even free schematic capture tools out there that are better. It seems to have been designed to make you as angry as possible. It randomly moves bits of net around as you draw, you end up with unconnected net on top of each other aaaah!. Its fine if you place all you components and then connect them and don’t ever move or copy anything, and you’ve got pleanty of time and patience and you like a challenge. If this is not you then I suggest an alternative tool or that you have a supply of valium to hand!
February 24, 2010 at 12:53 am |
I’d recommend always having valium on hand, just to feed to your boss when he’s aggravated that your design isn’t done yet.
February 23, 2010 at 9:30 pm |
With all due respect to you, grizzlycolorado, I’m on offlogic’s side here. I have to suspect that your willingness to tolerate DxD’s amazing suckitude is based purely on your having become inured to it. After five years and three major revisions, I’m still amazed at how buggy it is, how unpolished and downright hostile the user interface is. And I type this while the guy at the next desk is on a call with MG tech support – we clearly don’t have the same support rep as you, as no one we’ve ever talked to has been particularly competent or knowledgeable. I have offered this feedback directly to Mentor… [crickets]
February 28, 2010 at 7:27 am |
Mentor Graphics is unbelievably crappy. It’s like you’ve stepped into 1994. They sell on momentum only, and the fact that the folks that have been using it for all these years are woefully behind on what currently exists in the market.
Diptrace is amazing.
June 2, 2010 at 5:19 pm |
I agree PADS sucks…why do i keep getting the stupid “not licensed to use DxDatabook etc…”enough i disabled DxDatabook in the pop message…my god…i’ve never seen anything crash so much…so to sum up…PADS sucks!!
June 27, 2010 at 3:53 pm |
Agreed: there are so many reasons to dis-recommend the mutant hybrid DxDesigner package from Mentor. I don’t know how they could have screwed up their product this much without folding. It just isn’t worth the hassle of trying to use it.
August 18, 2010 at 12:46 pm |
Guys:
Thanks for the help in the decision making process. My boss has been looking at Mentor Graphics DxDesigner and PADS as the product to move to from our current schematic capture and board layout tool but I think Altium may be the way to go and your arguments for and against PADS and DxDesigner give me a leg to stand on. The last thing my company needs right now is to be crippled by a program that apparently is meant to be sold to huge, slow, already dead but don’t know it yet companies that have lots of people around with nothing better to do than make phone calls to support engineers and to “google” for help as one of you said. In the current business climate you have to be quick or you will soon be out of a job and business.
August 18, 2010 at 10:37 pm |
Speechless-
I feel your pain. It can be hard to dissuade “Management” from making demonstrably wrong decisions.
I’d used PADS in the dim past when it was a halfway decent system. Mentor Graphics has utterly screwed the pooch with the DxDesigner re-spin.
I am unequivocal in my opinion that it is the least desirable product in the field today.
September 15, 2010 at 11:00 pm |
altum blows dude, beware! Buggy, crashes.. oh, miserable.
August 23, 2010 at 3:19 pm |
DxD is utterly crap compared to other schematic packages I’ve used. Even mentorgraphics “Logic” (which was supposed to be superceded years ago by DxD) is still around yet we were told many years ago it would be killed-off by DxD. I’m an Orcad fan myself and I spent 10 months using DxD and finally gave up. I have a list of things that a piece of dust can do better. DxD is unworthy of existence and my blood’s boiling just writing about it so I’ll say no more. Andy
August 23, 2010 at 8:24 pm |
I see we feel largely the same way about this.
August 25, 2010 at 6:47 pm |
I hate dxdesigner! Drawing in the symbol editor is such torture! Everything about it is horrible. It sucks! and they charge BIG bucks for this!
September 10, 2010 at 7:50 am |
We have Mentor. I cannot understand why anybody changes to this software! I will change to Altium. Why yout company change to Mentor????? whats the reason????? I cannot understand this stupid stap.
September 14, 2010 at 4:12 pm |
i duno.. we tried Altium Designer 2009 and punted after a year it because it was unstable, buggy, bloated and just inefficient. Looks like there is market space for some company to come provide a solid sch/pcb. We wnt back to PCAD and just zoom along (even without fancy features that crash the program).
February 8, 2011 at 10:53 pm |
Hello Guys,
I have tried lots of EDA PCB tools, and my worst experience was with Mentor Pads. An absolutely bad designed software, with lots of bugs and a terrible help system. When I work with this piece of crap I have to smoke lots of cigars to keep relaxed. The people from Mentor have absolutely no compassion for the people that are actually going to work with their tools. Because of mentor I began drinking and taking pills!!! I prefer Altium and Allegro by 20dB more than the Mentor dissaster tools.
And remember, If you want to arrive late to the market, use Mentor Graphics.
If you want to die because of a stroke, use Mentor Graphics.
If you hate life use Mentor Graphics!!
If you want to pay more for less try Mentor Graphics!!
March 10, 2011 at 3:22 am |
Hi – the manufacturers within my company use Mentor ( and wont budge
, whereas design / schematic engineers like me use Altium…. any idea on the easiest way to translate FROm Altium TO mentor? – At the moment, they simply want me to print out loads of schematic plots, so they can re-do the whole thing from scratch in Mentor. Ive never touched Mentor – but surely it can import netlists or something from an intermediate format ( they claim it cant, or dont know how) ??
June 9, 2011 at 4:54 am |
Our distributor was able to provide us with a “translator” app that sort-of/half-assed handles converting designs from other formats into DxD format, but it’s like getting a barbed-wire enema to complete the the process. Working from paper printouts and manually converting might have fewer surprises/dashed hopes.
Seriously, I want to kill the responsible managers at MG, then leave their bodies in Batman suits hanging with jars of mayonnaise clutched in their hands.
I hate them and their product and their utter disdain for users THAT MUCH.
April 12, 2011 at 7:10 am |
Hello all,
I’m a COE student in college right now trying to use HDL designer, and Christ does it blow. Its bad enough that I’m just a newbie and I’m still learning the ropes, but when I have to spend hours (maybe even days) trying to debug HDL Designer before I can even start my real graded work, it makes me wonder why I want to do this for the rest of my life. At least as a writing major I don’t have to worry about Word forgetting what the letter “e” is. Sometimes I wonder if the compiler is determined by the tide because one hour stuff works like magic and the next I might as well have shit pretty pictures on the screen. The best thing about HDL Designer is that it is impossible to edit this work on anything but the lab computers with their fancy crapware, so I have to sit in the dark dungeon of the lab, at 4am in the morning, wishing I was a writing major or somebody digging ditches. It gets especially fun when I can’t fix the mistakes that HDL Designer makes so not compile on HDL Designer. I can look at the generated code, but heaven forbid I might want to change std_logic_vector to std_logic (something that is wrong but what HDL did anyway) where it is right in front of me, no I have to go to the schematic viewer, double click on the wire, click into the wire properties tab, and then edit the text.
With as convoluted as VHDL can be sometimes, I would prefer a decent text editor and a command line compiler over the stupid bloat that is Mento Graphics HDL Designer any day.
April 12, 2011 at 7:38 am |
Oh some Mento Grafics quickies:
Professors, teach your students humility with mentor graphics!
Mentor Graphics University Program, because its never too soon to start the short road to Alcoholism and Self Loathing.
Mento Grafics, because investors are not impressed with schematics in crayon.
Moentor Gradfics, because job security is something invented.
June 7, 2011 at 8:31 pm |
Wow this review of DxDesigner was written 2 years ago and just about everything in it is still completely true in 2011. You think after a couple years and multiple patches and updates Mentor would have tried to fix some of the problems that make it so unusable. After using Dxdesigner for a year and a half and listening to mentor say “it’s getting fixed in the next release”, only to have the next release come out and be equally bad, we’ve finally given up. I’d rather spend time remaking a thousand symbols in a new tool than to waste another minute using DxDesigner. It’s hard to believe how bad this program is until you’ve actually used it. I kept saying, maybe once I got used to it, it will be ok. But after a year and a half all you learn are that more and more things are broken. It’s a complete steaming pile of poo.
We file about 20 bugs with mentor everytime we do a design. Usually we get a response back in 6 months saying “we know this is a bug, but we’ve closed it as we’re not going to fix it.” Yes, so when parts magically unmirror and the nets move to different pins and there’s nothing to alert you your design is now wrong, yes this isn’t worth fixing according to mentor. When ever we call mentor, which is often the tech’s standard response is “Yes we know this is broken and we have no intention of fixing it, here is a work around…”
Anyone considering using a Mentor product, please, please, PLEASE! use something else! It doen’t matter what. Even using visio for schematics and making your netlist and bom manually in excel would be more effiecient than using DxDesigner.
Unless you want to spend more time debugging errors preventing you from “compiling” your schematic than actually designing circuits please don’t buy this program.
This program makes me hate going to work everyday. I used to love my job. I don’t even want to be an engineer any more.
F you mentor for making me hate my job I once loved
June 15, 2011 at 8:31 am |
It certainly seems like a classic outsource job to me – the absolute bare minimum required to get the job signed off and pro-active programming punished by dismissal.
Every feature, no matter how trivial (such as a hot key combination), requires a 100 page spec before we’ll implement it (cos we charge $10000 dollars for every paragraph). Every bug requires a similarly detailed spec before we’ll fix it, and we’ll charge you the full whack for bugs discovered after sign off. And so on.
Out-sourced software is the bottom of the food chain, IMO.
July 28, 2011 at 3:54 pm |
Pads is so horriable, it is costing my company sooo much time and money.. it is truly the worst, and it is so expensive… Sadly, there are no alternatives that are better and not dead.. They are all dead and gone the way of the dodo… I think that the other schematic capture ecad tools put to much time into user friendly code and not enough time into making the money they needed to stay alive. so they died… and mentor lives and drains money and gets stronger.. Who else can we use, who else can we use….
August 2, 2011 at 11:48 pm |
Death by marketplace is an ugly thing, so unrelated to actual quality of product (versus marketing, “installed base” inertia, etc).
I’m still an Altium proponent where expensive commercial ECAD is concerned (I love being able to rearrange device pins on the fly to make a schematic clearer).
At home I still use CadSoft Eagle (bought a license for a long-since-cratered home business some years back), but it does most small projects well enough to not be excruciating.
I am starting to actively search for open source solutions. “Fab Lab Tulsa” is opening soon, and I’m hoping to offer volunteer instruction in exchange for access to the cool tools.
September 16, 2011 at 4:11 pm |
Maybe some garlic and a stake?
There are other, better options to the cluster-kludge money-holes that Mentor puts out.
Tinkerers/Makers can try CadSoft EAGLE, there’s a lite version of McCad (just found out about them), several open-souce programs.
For pros I’d just say “anything but the Mentor product, full stop”. My current fave is Altium, but anything but Dxd/PADS Workflush.
September 16, 2011 at 3:23 pm |
How about McCad??
September 16, 2011 at 4:04 pm |
I haven’t heard of McCAD before.
Maybe I’ll take a look at their test drive over at http://www.mccad.com/.
There’s plenty of room in the market, might call it a target rich environment…
Thanks for the heads up!
September 16, 2011 at 5:56 pm |
McCAD has been around as long as anyone. Originally they where the only circuit tools available for MACS. Eventually they expanded to include PCs. They never got as large as the major players, maybe because the MAC market stunted their growth. They were part of the core group of circuit tool companies who were in on the ground floor in developing autorouter technology. And unlike the most of the others they were not purchased by the major players who were buying all the companies with autorouter technology to get a lock on that capability. McCAD’s autorouter is extremely capable and probably as good as anyones. It is an interesting history and George (the only guy you talk to for support) will be happy to tell you about the layout competition of the 1980′s in which PADS won in spite of the fact that all the routes to the edge connector of their board were all shorted together and no one noticed it until after the competition was over. Had someone noticed that it might have been a different story in the industry.
I like their tools and am a fan but have no affiliation with their company.
September 16, 2011 at 7:09 pm |
I am also thoroughly disgusted with Mentor tools. Presently, ModelSim is crashing inexplicably on me. Thanks for your comments, I got a chuckle out of them in spite of the recognized shared pain. I came across an open sourced tool “KiCAD” a few years ago and it looks very interesting for schematic capture as well as PCB layout. I haven’t used it for a full design iteration, so I don’t have first hand knowledge. I wonder if anyone can comment on it. There appears to be an ongoing effort to correct bugs and improve the program. Anyone out there used it successfully?
September 16, 2011 at 11:37 pm |
Steve, thanks for another entry in the PADS alternatives competition.
I’ll have to kick KiCAD’s tires real soon now!
September 17, 2011 at 4:15 am |
[...] I got so many interesting responses to the “Why does Mentor Graphics SUCK so Very, Very Much?” post, I wanted to explore some of the low-cost alternatives to “big CAD”. Not [...]
November 9, 2011 at 5:44 am |
I’ve enjoyed this read.
I came across this web-page while trying to find a DxD to Altium translator. No such luck for v7.9.2 schematics. And DxD won’t save as an earlier format that Altium will ‘sort of’ import.
I’ve used Protel/Altium for the last 12 years and it is my sole eCAD program that I’ve used. As a newbie it took a while to get the hang of “joining the dots” but Protel itself wasn’t the problem.
Anyway, these days I’m very comfortable with Altium and reckon it’s darn good with some quirks but not many bugs. I can do designs real quick when given the schematic pencil drawing.
Then things went sour. My company I work for got bought out and the new company has standardised on Mentor 7.9.2 everywhere. There is still a possibility that we might ignore Mentor locally but for collaborative worldwide projects there probably won’t be a choice for me.
Why am I sad about this?
1) I may retire in a few years time and I’m not keen on spending that period learning a program whereby I then promptly forget it, just when I may be useful with it.
2) I’ve probably spent nearly 2 weeks making sample schematics and pcbs with Mentor and I have discovered that I really really hate it.
Why do I hate it?
1) After 2 weeks I should have been able to draw schematic lines and pcb tracks. Just doing those simple tasks were difficult. So hard that I still don’t know how to place a pcb track and I don’t consider myself a dummy. I did manage to install Mentor which was no small feat I might add, through my company’s horrendous network/licensing issues.
2) No matter how you zoom you get 1 pixel lines and tracks, so what you see is NOT what you get.
3) Panning is completely un-intuitive! There seems to be 2 camps of the way things pan, grabbing the sheet and moving it or moving the sheet in the opposite direction of the mouse movement. Mentor & CAM350 are in the latter camp.
Altium and other photo packages are in the former camp. I find grabbing the sheet to be the easiest and BEST way to move around a schematic or pcb.
I have 4 screens and I have not been able to make the panning work properly with enough sensitivity, it just doesn’t work.
4) DxD lives in the dark ages. Literally! Schematics are black background by default. Schematics should always be printed with a white background. A parchment coloured background is far superior for schematics. I tried changing the colours for my schematic and I got a off-white background but all the selection colours get screwed up and are unable to be seen properly when selecting parts and lines. This got logged into Mentor as a bug. Why should something so simple as asking for a non-black background be not catered for by Mentor? It’s a disgrace.
5) Training is expensive because I don’t see how self learning is an option. Not unless we all get unlimited time to play around, unlikely in these days of productivity issues.
I’m sure that given time I could be ok with Mentor even though I would have to re-think the way I pan. But my beef with this attitude is that it’s totally unproductive and within the next 3-5 years I’ll never be as productive as I am now.
All of the electronic engineers around me have the same thought. As the sole eCAD engineer here I’ll have trouble getting the time to learn but I pity all the electronic engineers around me who will only ever use it on a casual basis and have as little experience with Mentor as me.
It was nice to see that I’m not alone with my view of Mentor.
I’m hoping for a miracle and we disgard Mentor except for world collaborations for simply checking designs. Locally I hope we will initiate new designs still in Altium.
I could cope with that scenario.
Cross fingers.
November 9, 2011 at 6:48 am |
To quote my daughter: “Yeah, I know, RIGHT?”
The only words to describe the DxD experience are “utterly pathetic“.
The mentor zoom thing is enough to justify violence upon all the Mentor Graphics bastards. A tent-peg in the chest is much too good for them!
“Transform” instead of “rotate”/flip, that’s another simple, obvious feature that even EAGLE has them beat all to friggin’ Hell on.
I mean, Jeez Louise, go play mahjong on Pogo.com… even the game can select a non-conflicting rubber-band route better than DxD!
Altium makes pin-moves on a schematic symbol easy, so your schematic can tell the story it needs to instead of however DxD insists it should be.
Seriously, there’d be Mentor blood on the streets if Society had a rational view of ‘justifiable homicide’.
Duct tape. GPS/cell-phone jammer. Gimp mask. Lonely rural highway. Chipper/shredder. Fish farm.
Devo said : “Toil is Stupid”. Mentor Graphics didn’t understand the statement.
‘Nuff said.
November 28, 2011 at 5:08 am |
Mentor Graphics’ entire board of directors should be rendered homeless and forced to drink large amounts of antifreeze for what they did to PADS.
It was usable at one time, but they screwed it up. I agree with an earlier comment: they just outsourced the job and rendered the product Doomed.
Mentor only exists now because of the FUD factor (fear, uncertainty and doubt) of the current “installed base”.
Their licensing is such a nickle-and-dime job (“Oh, you want to be able to actually place parts at a non 90 degree angle? That’s another $XX thousand per seat!”) that my employer is content to purchase only one 3/4 licence and two 1/2 license seats… using a bootleg full license on an employee’s personal laptop for the ticklish parts of layouts. It’s a real ethical dilemma. If “Ms. Management” wasn’t stealing from Mentor Graphics….
Arrrrg! Standards are good, but only if you are very careful when setting them. PADS is such a bullshit standard, like hitting on the last girl standing at closing time (not intending to sound sexist, just observant of semi-human behavior).
November 18, 2011 at 3:30 pm |
Our shop is transitioning from Mentor garbage tools to Altium. Altium is a breeze. Everything is intuitive and works as one would expect. I was 100% productive on the schematic level in a few days with a somewhat sophisticated very high speed digital design. Unfortunately I now have to modify a recent Mentor design in DxDesigner. I take back what I said about Mentor. I said that it is bad beyond imagination. Well, I was wrong IT IS PAINFUL beyond imagination!!! Every little thing is an adventure wasting huge amounts of time. Right now I’m struggling with updating a block symbol representing an underlying schematic sheet. The symbol on the top level sheet is screwed up. In the symbol editor and in the DxDataBook it looks fine. It just won’t update. Every time I use Mentor tools it is a nightmare. Will someone please put that company out of existance???? I can’t believe they arn’t embarrased to even answer the telephone.
December 2, 2011 at 9:49 pm |
Our department spends $100k annually for support crap Expedition/DxD MG tools. We recently purchased Altium Designer 10 for $5k and without much effort produced several boards. VERY pleased with Altium. Pretty intuitive and the GUI is responsive and polished. In Altium I can start from an empty project, make my parts, draw my schematic, and go into layout. Agreed that MG’s tools are painful. MG is the borg of software: acquire, kludge, patch, repeat…
December 3, 2011 at 2:12 am |
Agreed.
Just in an offhand trekkie sort of snark, I’d say the Federation would have nothing to fear of the Borg if they sucked as bad as MG, in my opinion.
Their ships wouldn’t fly, their command structure would collapse, all their augmentations would be incompatible, the documentation would be irrelevant, and the Queen would be the only one that spoke only Finnish.
December 9, 2011 at 9:31 am |
Just an interesting point to make…
Its the end of 2011. If I recall correctly, Microsoft said that their Win8 is coming out next year. And still, Mentor Graphic PADS still don’t fully support Win7 without someone having to tweak the compatibility feature. Yes they are sticking to Vista, which is something even Agilent is throwing out in their ADS 2012 (XP still supported).
Yeah, first thing installing their trial to check how crappy it was, errors starting to pop up during the install (ewww). After that buggy install finishes, I tried to turn DXD on and was met with a software malfunction. It was only after I tweaked with the compatibly feature before I can get a proper install and actually have the program running.
Even then, the experience sucked. I was wondering, did Mentor hired a Literary English Ph.D to choose their vocabulary? I’ve used other programs before but the wording Mentor used was just bizarre. I can’t even figure out the proper ways to setup a custom library, and any software that fails that will just get a big NO from me head on (because I know it’ll be making me miserable if I force myself to use it). I’d say they stuffed way too many features into it (so did Altium, but at least I can get around the PCB parts of that fine as compared to Mentor) and makes learning how to use such software miserable. I’ve found and used much cheaper solutions to it who stuck strictly to what the software was suppose to do, schematics and pcbs, and had a much much shorter and easier learning curve.
I think I can tell why people are saying they draw schematics with OrCAD and PCBs with PADS…. (I first wondered why they’re not doing both with PADS in the first place)
December 16, 2011 at 1:57 am |
As a user of various versions of PADS, Protel99SE, and now Altium, a lot of what people are saying here makes sense to me. I have been using PADS2004SP2 for some time but wanted to upgrade to 9.3.2 to be sure I had the latest and greatest. Conclusion: don’t waste your money.
Also, for you DxD users, why not use PADS Logic. It’s not hard to use and you can export to older versions easily.
Plus, AFA exporting for use with Altium in something like PADS 2007 or 9.3 or whatever, for the PCB and for PADS Logic is dead easy.
December 16, 2011 at 4:12 am |
Good points.
Where I am there is no choice to use any other variant of Mentor, only the latest DxD and Expedition.
Since we still pay for and still use Altium we feel no urge to move to Mentor from Altium. My reasons are written above somewhere.
For others who are not locked in to one or the other then PADS may well be a good choice, I’ve never used it myself to give an opinion on PADS.
December 22, 2011 at 4:19 am |
About PADS Logic, I’m not sure why they are hiding stuff, but what’s the point of hiding the most important toolbar on default (they called it Decal Editing Toolbar) when you are trying to edit/create a new part?
Second, it was VERY poor to choose that vocabulary since if you go to File -> Library (must exit Edit Graphic first), you can see that “Decal” is actually PCB Patterns (which is correct) and Parts being Schematic Symbols. So now, why was that “Parts” toolbar called “Decal” toolbar? No clue really. I mean, only literary English love thesaurus and all those different word meaning the same thing will make your writing better stuff. Sorry, but NOT on a professional engineering software.
Btw, still haven’t found the right place to create new ‘real’ decals in PADS Logic yet… (trying to do this all by instinct to test its user friendliness, or unfriendliness on that matter)
December 22, 2011 at 5:35 am |
Chris,Wanderer,et al-
I can’t even comment on some of your points, since I’m hobbled by the MG license/employer malfeasance index, but “rational defaults” can make or break software acceptance (viz ‘Windows’- never got it right, but it at least sticks once the tweaks are in).
I mean, FUG IT!
Spent over an hour getting MG PADS to spit out an assembly print last week. With all the damned tweaking it took (selecting layers, parts of layers, features of parts of layers, et cetera) you’d think that set of options would be save-able or applicable to other projects, right?
If using MG PADS, you’d know that the answer is ‘NO’, with a hearty ‘Fuck You Very Much’, from Mentor Graphics.
Damn all of Mentor Graphics’ souls to fucking Hell! They’ve been in the ‘biz’ long enough to know better. Let’s all quit cutting them slack, pretending that they have athe slightest clue, eh?
Burn, baby, BURN, Mentor! You FUCKERS have it coming!!!
January 27, 2012 at 4:38 pm |
Well, I’ve completed a few other schematic designs on Altium now after moving from Mentor. What would take me a week or more on Mentor DxDesigner takes me an hour on Altium. Lots of cutting and pasting from previous work along with global text replacemens which work as one would expect modern software to work make schematic efforts short and efficient. There are no hiccups, no glitches, no crashes, no lockups … Things just work. Controls are extremely intuitive since the user interface is consistent with modern applictaions. No jumping through Mentor hoops any more to get simple things done. If I’m ever job hunting, one offer acceptance or interview show stopper for me will be their use of Mentor tools. If they admit that they are a Mentor shop then interview over.
January 27, 2012 at 11:59 pm |
That’s my reaction. Right now I’d rather deal with the IRS than use DxD/PADS.
Yeah, it’s that painful.
January 31, 2012 at 4:36 am |
The answer to everyone’s PADS problems: wait for it…..ALTIUM!
February 16, 2012 at 5:40 pm |
Somehow I ended up stumbling upon this post while trying to find the answer to a DxDesigner problem I’m having. In frustration, I typed in “DxDesigner sucks” into google, and voila, here I am!
I’ve been an Altium user for roughly 5 years now, ever since Altium 6 (they’re not at AD10, which is much quicker and less bloaty compared to AD9 as one user mentioned above). Anyways, I switched jobs and this place just happens to be stuck in the Mentor rut. I knew it would be painful to switch from something I was used to (and love(d) by the way), but I bit the bullet, and started to use the piece of crap called DxDesigner. My 1st problem (besides getting a part from DxDatabook to my schematic) was drawing a wire from one pin to another. Why can’t you just draw a wire w/ a click of the left mouse button??? Nooo you have to press ‘n’ for net and click-drag the wire, or use the right-mouse button, provided you’re not trying to tie into the middle of a net. Every schematic tool I’ve used uses the left mouse button to draw a wire in some fashion, not click-drag, right mouse button…etc. Anywho, after 8 months w/ fighting DxDesigner, I’m still unbelievably slow @ creating a schematic. I wouldn’t even want to create a PCB w/ Expedition. It takes roughly 2-4 minutes to start up (DxDesigner on the other hand starts pretty quick) and it’s not terribly intuitive how to do anything. Why yes, I’d love to forward annotate the design into expedition (thinking this would bring parts in). Oh…no parts….why are the old parts still on the PCB that I JUST replaced w/ something totally different in the schematic??? So much for forward annotation. Looks like it updates its net list, but nothing else. Thanks, that’s helpful.
At my old job, sure, we’d complain about Altium. There are quirks, oddities, and other things (like the black bar of death!) However, all of these problems added up (which are largely gone in AD10) pale in comparison w/ the issues in DxDesigner.
When using Altium, I always thought it was gimmicky how they say you’ll be 200% more productive w/ their tool. Yeah right you think. If you’re coming from DxDesigner, it’s guaranteed you’ll be > 200% more productive!! It took me about a month to really get used to the majority of the advanced features in Altium’s schematic, PCB, and FPGA interfaces. In comparison, I’ve been using DxDesigner for 8 months and I’m still struggling w/ the simple features, like drawing a wire in the schematic. I just started a hierarchical schematic in DxDesigner, and it scares me. I have pretty much no confidence things will be hooked up they way they should be.
Stay away from DxDesigner like the plague!
February 22, 2012 at 1:32 am |
I don’t use DxDesigner but I found your blog typing “Mentor Graphics sucks!” into Google. I use their IC Simulation tools and they waste so much of my time. They constantly upgrade their software and introduce subtle bugs. These are the worst. I’d rather they just not work. MG has a tool called Eldo Premier that supposedly is just as accurate as any other SPICE simulator, but uses a faster algorithm. Turns out it doesn’t actually conserve charge in all cases. I had some strange results and spent literally 4 hours tracking down a comparator that operated correctly with Eldo Classic, but failed with Eldo Premier. Just as accurate my ass. I think my organization should bill them for my wasted time. And this just happened last week… this kind of garbage is not rare.
And just today, I’m trying to run this fast-SPICE simulator called ADiT and I can’t get it to produce output in Mentor Graphics’ own format (wdb)! Of course the error message is not anywhere to be found on their support page…
I think these big EDA companies make their money by coming out with hot new tools chasing after the fad of the day. I wish the market punished them for not fixing their tools and just sucking in general. But, that’s not the way things work. Chip companies actually employ sizable CAD departments whose main job is to set up and fix problems with these terrible tools. I wish I were making that up.
In other words, I feel you’re pain, man.
February 29, 2012 at 12:31 am |
Altium current stock price = $0.18 Australian Dollars
Mentor Graphics stock price = $15 US Dollars
Altium design center = china (infact, they up and moved just about everything to China but a few execs)
Mentor Graphics design center = Wilsonville, OR
Dominant PCB design market share = Mentor Graphics.
It’s cute that real engineers have time to write pages on tools that I was able to master for my senior project in college.
February 29, 2012 at 12:39 pm |
It’s great to hear from another person that likes MG!
My perspective is that it was a better product 10-15 years ago.
It is sad to me as an engineer, having gone from doing layouts with tape and mylar through the modern crop of software tools,
to see a once fine product devolve into the current mess, taking all its installed base down the the garden path of reduced functionality with it.
March 28, 2012 at 2:24 am |
Having used both programs, PADS and Altium Designer, I’d say that the stock prices tell more about the stock market than about the product. If Altium Designer is designed in China nowadays, then good for them. Maybe guys from Oregon should learn from them.
April 10, 2012 at 3:16 pm |
Maybe it’s just that Mentor and DX is the first REAL tool you used and you need to get up to speed on the larger learning curve than is the case with etch a sketch tools.
May 5, 2012 at 4:15 pm |
There is that possibility. It may be that I prefer, in comparison, the way most other EDA tools work, and the way PADS used to work before Mentor’s recent re-spins.
I know I hate having my productivity reduced by a tool, having schematics that look like crap and are difficult to read.
I wouldn’t use a shovel that only works when oriented north and I don’t appreciate a mature piece of EDAware that makes me change the way I design… for the worse.
Moving backwards is an ugly thing to watch, especially when it drags the installed base with it down the rubbish heap.