Renesas Buys Altium
renesas.com
renesas.com
0: https://www.reddit.com/r/diypedals/comments/14bz17c/comment/...
For even moderately complex work, Altium and KiCad aren’t even comparable. I don’t think the size of this gap is obvious to the average hobbyist, but professional packages like Altium have a depth and breadth of features that will take years or decades to replicate in the open source space. There’s a reason professionals and organizations are paying huge amounts of money for Altium licenses still.
No doubt there's a lot of complexity in F1 electronics, but they certainly have more space, cooling, reasonable environment, etc. to work with than some industries.
(Not to disagree that it was dismissive and a lot of serious work gets done with Altium Designer, and for that matter Kicad, of course.)
I duuno man, at a startup I worked at, the graybeard EE was doing 2.4GHz RF design on software cheaper and more rudimentary than Altium, let alone Cadence.
So I'm always rolling my eyes when someone uses the world "real" as some sort of macho flex with vague meaning like "real men", "real work", "real engineering", "real software development", as if only their particular example makes the world go round and scoff at everything else like it's unimportant child's play.
When you start working with very high speed things like DDR4/DDR5 on 14 layer boards you could do it with simpler software, but I don't see why you would. The time saved with the design tools and signal integrity simulations would likely be worth much more than the licensing cost, especially if you're bigger than a small hobby shop. Not to mention the money saved on having software that can identify mistakes early on when the PCBs alone can cost thousands.
And then there's all the other bits like conforming to standards, providing deliverables in a format that the next place down the line deems "acceptable" (or they're just picky), as interoperability with other teams, because sometimes you're just one small part of the design process.
Altium has good support for high speed design features. (Source: Have done many high-speed designs in Altium and Allegro)
Altium is quite common at tech companies. I think maybe the parent commenter was being sarcastic?
> I think maybe the parent commenter was being sarcastic?
Yeah, see my direct reply to them (before my comment above), I honestly don't know.
Mostly I was refuting:
> There’s a reason professionals and organizations are paying huge amounts of money for Altium licenses still.
Uh, no. They're not actually paying huge amounts--that's part of the reason Altium got bought. Professionals use professional tools--Altium doesn't qualify. I really do not understand what Renesas thinks they are going to get from this.
The autorouter is terrible. The constraint mechanisms suck. Co-design with mechanical CAD is poor. Large designs slow it to a crawl. Design sharing is incredibly weak. Source control and database integrations are laughably bad. I can go on and on and on.
There are solid reasons why professionals pay an order of magnitude more money for Xpedition and Allegro over Altium.
Sure, I have designed high-speed digital as well as high-GHz RF designs in weak PCB products (including both Altium and KiCad)--that's not a badge of honor, though.
When time and efficiency actually matters, you put on your big boy boots, suck it up and cough up real money for real tools.
> Altium is quite common at tech companies.
This is fine. As is using KiCad. 99% of companies are not doing anything complex enough for it to matter.
> Anybody who needs real PCB features isn't using Alitum
and:
> 99% of companies are not doing anything complex enough for it to matter
in the same breath - it really doesn't do your argument any favors. I can't see a world in which only 1% and "anybody who needs real PCB features" are congruent statements.
Maybe not quite taken to the absolute extreme, there may be a point there about actually needing more advanced tools at some level, but.. plenty of real world serious work gets done with all sorts of tools including Kicad.
I feel like there's this sort of reverse Dunning-Krueger effect where people who are sufficiently advanced in a particular subject area lose track of just how much can be accomplished without operating at, and using tooling at, that same level.
Case in point, it still blows my mind that HN runs on a single process on a single server. Surely one of the tech world's most well known news aggregators would have many servers behind it, with advanced autoscaling for when different time zones come online, a database that's sharded by discussion thread, some super advanced caching solution, ...
But no. HN hums along just fine without any of that fancy stuff.
The truly enlightened, in my opinion, know how to look at the world through the eyes of those less experiences than themselves - and to see how much there is to see when one takes off one's expert glasses for a moment.
A better comparison would be Canva. Can I do everything in Canva that I can in Illustrator? Not by a long shot. Is it still good enough for 80% of the things I need to do? Absolutely. Is it a delight to work with despite its comparative simplicity? You bet.
So I agree that time and pain saved is hugely important, but that's an orthogonal axis to how advanced a tool is. The two only really correlate when you're doing things that need that advanced tooling in order to avoid a lot of manual work.
And I feel it's a Dunning-Krueger effect that people who don't know more powerful tools can't understand why you might benefit from using them.
I assert that you've lost track of how much you can accomplish programming in Notepad and it would be enlightening to look at the lens of how people accomplish that. Now do you understand why you might want to use more powerful tools?
Or, perhaps in a more concrete sense, not every woodworking shop needs a $150K CNC machine--the $10K ones work great for 99% of the shops. However, the ones that do need that $150K CNC are producing a LOT of product.
> 99% of companies are not doing anything complex enough for it to matter.
There seems to be very few professionals in the industry then.
1. Data mining the usage of competitor products
2. An avenue to shovel their chips. Even though they are massive assholes to work with and don't want to talk to you if to you aren't buying millions of chips per week.
3. Semiconductor manufacturers seem to see "buying software" as some diversification scheme. looks at Broadcom
I'm just surprised I haven't even heard of them before (I've heard of Cadence but not confident about Allegro) - though I did manage my quasi-EE degree I think without ever touching PCB design! (I've done so before and since, but just Eagle, Kicad, and.. I think it was called CircuitWizard at school.)
As a massive tangent, I've repeatedly since thought that CircuitWizard or something like it (or whatever it's called) would actually be great for the sort of Arduino hobbyist/newcomer - it had a really good built-in component library, but quite small, and (crucially for that audience IMO) no or little choice, so really simplified. Like I need a mux of this size, or I need 4 NAND gates or whatever, and you just place that part and it lists the BOM - you're not bogged down with an overwhelming choice where to a newcomer it probably doesn't matter, or at least there's an obvious non-specialised choice.
Ironically, It’s only when I started doing hobby electronics that I learned about the existence of Altium.
(That’s not a value judgement of Altium, I honestly don’t know how they compare.)
In general, Mentor and Cadence packages are where the serious electrical engineering happens where you are talking about routing gigahertz signals and simulating it. Even thermal simulations are a big deal in those suites.
I won't be as snide as bsder, but I will say Expedition and Allegro let you handle some crazy complex designs, which are much more of a challenge with Altium. Things like DDR3/4/5, 10+ layer PCBs, complex design rules, etc. Personally I think Expedition is much much easier to use than Allegro ; for the curious it was actually created by a company called 'Veribest' that Mentor later acquired.
Having using Altium (all the way back to when it was Protel 98/99SE) it's gained a lot of impressive capability but it never shed a number of weird UI oddities.
I'm really happy to see the direction KiCad is going, having used it circa v3 era, it's MUCH more usable.
Allegro IMO does have a pretty steep learning curve, I think it's UI is quite archaic, it really hasn't see any serious improvements in over 20-years.
I'd suggest Kicad if you wanted to do anything personal.
If the feature set of KiCad fits your needs, then it's a great choice. It does quite well at simple boards and it can be made to work for certain minimal high-speed or RF boards if you have enough space and know how to make it work for you.
However, I'm surprised you haven't found any features that you're missing. Even common settings like design rules are missing frequently-used features in KiCad. I immediately miss some of the more fine-grained design rule settings of the more powerful packages every time I use KiCad.
And the reasons why professionals and organizations are paying huge amounts for specific software are often less enlightened than we tend to assume. Inertia is a huge factor. Many universities train students to use Altium, for example, so it's often the path of least resistance. Plus, when you have processes and teams built around a tool that was cutting-edge a decade or two ago, it can be hard to switch. Especially for niche software like this, interoperability tents to be poor, every vendor invents their own UI and terminology from first principles, etc.
But KiCad and Altium are not the only choices. There are affordable "serious hobbyist" products with much better UX (e.g., Diptrace) and there are higher-end commercial tools that leave Altium in the dust.
The single thing Altium really had going for it was that it had sort of become a lingua franca of sharable designs. And engineers, being the lazy shits they are, would simply pack up the library and ship it with the schematics. Consequently, you got an actual, engineering validated symbol and layout when a company gave you schematics.
Once Altium changed such that you could ship a library that couldn't be extracted from, they lost the only thing that really set them apart from the competition.
All the cloud and parts management crap was just insult to injury after that.
KiCAD is good enough for all but the most demanding commercial use at this point. It has some quirks, but all CAD programs do. Every major release has been a big step forward. Version 7 was a huge step up, and they're about to release Version 8.
The biggest issues with KiCad would be using them for very complex designs: huge numbers of length-matched busses (think desktop computer motherboards), weird flex designs that need combined electro-mechanical CAD, so many signals that you need a complex autorouter, extremely advanced inventory management, etc.
He did the same thing regarding locking down import/export with Expedition circa ~2006 or ~2008(?) specifically to tie people into a Mentor flow, breaking years of tools people had written that enabled footprint / schematic import/export capability.
In an a "Jack Welch" kind of way, somehow he attained industry envy from the other EDA companies and Altium hired him, even though, like Jack Welch, he's not someone who actually did positive things.
I used Altium in my previous job in high voltage and we were amonst the first to use the Creepage feature. It reminded me that there's niche features to be developed for every industry, and there's a future where they resource heavily on automotive. On one hand, $6B seems like enough to go around for everyone but on the other hand, Renesas would only spend $6B if they saw it making/saving them $10B+.
I'd like them to speak more on the long term vision and focus of the product; I think they've done a good job at serving EEs so far and if they'll still hold that position or get pulled away into one loud market. Regardless, that's like in 5-10 years time; I'd be impressed if anything changes in the next 2 years.
Full disclosure, I'm now working at flux.ai but I don't think that doesn't really changes the news for me; I understand Altium is still used by many EE companies who I can still sympathize with, and we're humbly comin' after them :P
Altium’s play has always been to segment the market at the hobby+small enterprise+startup level, with aim to push further up to larger enterprises as those companies grow. They’re taking aim at the next gen EE/design engineers as the graybeards age out of the industry. Let’s see if this strategy holds out with Renesas positioned above.
For $6B, they could have bought completely new technology such as UWB, etc which they may not have.
Not sure if their pending offer for sequens is done or not as we’ll
FAANG’s ability to scale up compute is limited by their ability to design, test, and manufacture silicon. Every competitive AI company is working to build it’s own
Everyone is focused on making software layer more efficient, we are seeing 3-5x productivity gains
I am the founder of https://flux.ai and we are the only ones making the hardware layer more efficient, 6-15x productivity gains!
As you saw with NVIDIA’s growth, the hardware side of this is as valuable as the software side
Flux.ai is a AI first hardware design platform build for the modern age. Our mission is to take the “hard” out of hardware
LFG
Kicad is a long way from being usable for high speed boards and Flux is currently far less usable than that.
I am sure Flux might be 3-5x more productive for folks slapping an ESP32 and some LEDs down on 2 layers, but it's basically impossible to do any kind of real board with substantial power delivery or high speed routing. I can't even imagine trying to route a 8L board with Flux, much less a 20L board with HDI (can you do HDI?)
Cool beginnings, but ultimately DOA from the difficult fact that I am not going to lock up my business's IP in your proprietary web service. I don't know how you are going to ever get past this particular sticking point: at least with Altium, I have a SchDoc I can parse when things go south - and an offline copy of the software.
It's why we never implemented it in KiCad, and why Blender has a "2d drawn navigation controller" instead of 3d drawn.
But yea, I'm not the biggest fan of the Flux approach but maybe I'm too traditionist. I'm a big fan of _understanding_ the design. Yes, I can even use a code gen to generate a fuck ton of boilerplate now with AI. But do I actually know what it's doing? At a surface level sure, at the indepth level? Ugh I don't look.
The penalty of using AI at hardware is the designer loses any forced motivation to actually understand what they are designing. This is critical to be able to troubleshoot designs, and even do things like worse case failure analysis and anything fancier.
For simple designs, sure, you probably don't care or need to know much about a LM317 linear regulator putting 5V to a terminal block.
For advanced designs, from my and many others experience, the problem escalates to chips having undocumented errata and even datasheets just being wrong. If you don't read the datasheet in the first place in the design, you'll be even more lost trying to figure out what's going on. You ultimately have to reach out to the semiconductor vendor and go back and forth, but if you don't even have that starting knowledge you aren't going to be very productive doing so.
Otherwise if I want a generated design for something simple, I could just use TI's WebBench and the like to generate them, no AI required :shrug:. I still get bit once in awhile with regulators that have compensation loop issues contrary to the datasheet the generator was based on. Hah.
Oddly, this is exactly the type of person for whom AI will result in a failure. You can get AI to generate this bit and instantly know how to integrate it and if it's got a major error/oversight.
I literally tried to do this with a 9V battery and a vape cartridge (simple resistance load) to jerry-rig a vape whose power source had died but the rest worked fine. I had a box of all the most common op-amps, transistors, and some voltage regulators. Also plenty of other passives on-hand, pretty much anything that could be needed. I asked a variety of AI's including ChatGPT-4 and Flux.ai to design this for me. But none of them worked for providing enough current, or even generally the right voltage.
And I didn't know enough about electronics to know what wasn't working.
I use AI a lot in software programming. But I use it for the basic, boring boilerplate stuff that I just don't want to type. It frees up my time and brainpower to spend on the hard parts with trickier data structures and algorithms where there's no "right" answer, just different trade-offs. Using AI for the simple stuff is easy because I can quickly read the code that is output and instantly find any errors before I copy/paste it into my work. But if I ask the AI to make something complicated, it can take awhile for me to see where the errors are, or that there's a subtle structural problem with the architecture that's making things far more complex than they need to be. These parts are better hand-crafted.
The boilerplate isn't stuff you generally need AI for really if you are working professionally in electrical. You just pull-up a premade "design block" your company has standardized on.
One of the big things in electrical is you aren't reinventing the wheel each time in your design once you have products going. You re-use parts especially to get long term economy of scale pricing benefits from part vendors by using the same parts more often. This is for everything from ICs to capacitors.
These design blocks extend so far that not only could you drop in pre-made schematic circuits but also premade layout chunks in the CAD tools.
That's if you don't just open an existing schematic and just rename it to your new schematic and make changes hah
And once your overall design gets boilerplate enough, you just get outsourced. It's why no consumer and industrial power supply module design occurs in the US. That stuff has been outsourced to basically 3 or 4 Taiwanese and Chinese OEMs that just copy and paste the same design into different form factors.