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Alex34 , 04-17-2020, 06:56 AM

Hello All!

Does anybody know what PCB CADs major companies use? Companies like Intel, Apple, Samsung and so on. I guess, Cadence Allegro is the most popular CAD in companies developing complex PCBs (like CPU motherboards). Is that true?

Johnnyjax , 04-17-2020, 07:24 AM

I've always thought that was altium

Alex34 , 04-17-2020, 07:29 AM

I think Altium is middle-end CAD. It's hard to route really big high speed board with it. High-end solutions are (as far as I know): Cadence Allegro, Mentor Graphics xPedition, Zuken Cadstar.
I thought xPedition is the leader, but someone told me that Cadence Allegro is the most popular CAD.

robertferanec , 04-20-2020, 02:03 AM

They often use multiple CAD systems. Reason - many big companies buy smaller companies and these smaller companies are often using different CAD systems.

This is what I believe that these companies are using for majority of their projects (but I do not know for sure):
- Intel: Cadence
- AMD: Cadence
- Apple: Cadence
- Tesla (and maybe also SpaceX): Altium
- Facebook: Mixed (Cadence, Altium)
- NASA: Altium
- Google: Mixed
- Microsoft: Mixed

I do not hear from anyone using Mentor, so I do not know who use them.

If you work in bigger companies, please update/correct this list, I am also interested to know what CAD software companies are using. Thank you.

Alex34 , 04-20-2020, 12:17 PM

Thank you, Robert.

I work in Russia, and we use Altium in our company (I'm not happy with that, though ) BTW, Altium is extremely popular in Russia for some reasons. Also, I know at least one company developing x86 based servers. They use Cadence.

Paul van Avesaath , 05-15-2020, 03:23 AM

Nasa = Altium... well if it good enough for them it's good enough for me.. and is very capable of desinging very big highspeed boards! in my experience so far altium does seem to be the most intuitive to work with.. Mentor is really getting old and if not for thier hyperlynx tool i would not use it.. cadence seems to be the most used, but that are all American companies.. so they tend to stick with american tools..

Seriez , 05-18-2020, 02:43 AM

The US Branch of the Company I am with uses Mentor (we use Altium) and we had a Meeting a few weeks ago to discuss if we include Mentor to our Toolset.
We reached the conclusion that Mentor is by far the more powerful tool to design very complex boards (I was surprised myself by how much stuff Mentor can do) but for our regular day to day needs Altium is good enough.
Mentor has a steeper learning curve as well while anyone can make a basic Board in Altium with no real previous knowledge.

According to this Website AMD and Apple use it: -> https://discovery.hgdata.com/product/mentor-graphics

robertferanec , 05-18-2020, 08:03 AM

@Seriez thank you for that info! Le't see if there will be a day, when mentor will allow me to test their tools PS: I used to work with PADS like 12years ago, I didn't like that software. However I love Hyperlynx from Mentor.