P-CAD

Last updated

Personal CAD Systems, Inc.
Industry Electronic design automation
Founded1982
FoundersRichard Nedbal, Roy Prasad
Defunct2000
Headquarters
ProductsP-CAD

P-CAD was the brand name of Personal CAD Systems, Inc., a California based manufacturer of electronic design automation software. It manufactured a CAD software available for personal computers. The company was divested into ACCEL Technologies which was purchased by Altium in 2000. The last release of the software was in 2006 before it was retired in favor of the Altium Designer product.

Contents

History

Personal CAD Systems was founded in 1982 by Richard Nedbal and Roy Prasad. [1] Both were former executives of American Microsystems, Inc. (AMI), a custom semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California. Also, part of the founding team were Gregory Houston, VP Marketing, a former Calma executive, and Chi-Song Horng, Director of software engineering (later promoted as a Vice President), a former AMI software engineering manager.

P-CAD was a play on personal computers, which were just becoming popular, following the launch of the IBM PC. The vision of the company was to disrupt the existing hegemony of $250,000 CAD systems based on mainframe computers and custom workstations, and make electronic CAD available to the masses at a cost under $10,000. The company originally raised US$500,000 from CrossPoint Venture Partners, and US$3,000,000 in a second round from New Enterprise Associates and Robertson, Coleman and Stephens.

P-CAD went on to become the company with the biggest installed base of users of Electronic Design Automation (EDA), with over 10,000 users by 1988. At that time, P-CAD was the most prolific EDA company as measured by its user base, easily surpassing established CAD companies such as Autotrol, Calma, Intergraph, Daisy, Mentor, Cadnetix, CAE Systems, ECAD, SDA Systems, etc. At that time, Cadence was just being formed with the merger of ECAD and SGA, and Synopsys was being founded as a new start up.

P-CAD's flagship products included schematic capture, logic simulation and PCB layout. Its single biggest customer was Texas Instruments. In 1989, P-CAD was acquired by Cadam, which was a subsidiary of Lockheed, [2] but was in the process of being sold to IBM. [3] At the time of acquisition, P-CAD had an installed base of over 100,000 end users, a record at that time. A few years later, the P-CAD group was divested by selling to ACCEL Technologies, an EDA software corporation from San Diego, California, which was acquired by Protel International Pty Ltd (now Altium) in 2000. The P-CAD product included schematic capture, component library management, PCB layout and routing, parametric constraint solver and auto-routing capability.

The last version of P-CAD was P-CAD 2006 with Service Pack 2, released in 2006. This was the last release made by Altium, who retired the product in favor of Altium Designer. [4]

See also

Related Research Articles

Electronic design automation (EDA), also referred to as electronic computer-aided design (ECAD), is a category of software tools for designing electronic systems such as integrated circuits and printed circuit boards. The tools work together in a design flow that chip designers use to design and analyze entire semiconductor chips. Since a modern semiconductor chip can have billions of components, EDA tools are essential for their design; this article in particular describes EDA specifically with respect to integrated circuits (ICs).

Calma Company, based in Sunnyvale, California, was, between 1965 and 1988, a vendor of digitizers and minicomputer-based graphics systems targeted at the cartographic and electronic, mechanical and architectural design markets.

Schematic capture or schematic entry is a step in the design cycle of electronic design automation (EDA) at which the electronic diagram, or electronic schematic of the designed electronic circuit, is created by a designer. This is done interactively with the help of a schematic capture tool also known as schematic editor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">EAGLE (program)</span> Scriptable electronic design automation application

EAGLE is a scriptable electronic design automation (EDA) application with schematic capture, printed circuit board (PCB) layout, auto-router and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) features. EAGLE stands for Easily Applicable Graphical Layout Editor and is developed by CadSoft Computer GmbH. The company was acquired by Autodesk Inc. in 2016 who announced to support the product up to 2026 only.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OrCAD</span> Electronic design automation software

OrCAD Systems Corporation was a software company that made OrCAD, a proprietary software tool suite used primarily for electronic design automation (EDA). The software is used mainly by electronic design engineers and electronic technicians to create electronic schematics, and perform mixed-signal simulation and electronic prints for manufacturing printed circuit boards (PCBs). OrCAD was taken over by Cadence Design Systems in 1999 and was integrated with Cadence Allegro in 2005.

gEDA

The term gEDA refers to two things:

  1. A set of software applications used for electronic design released under the GPL. As such, gEDA is an ECAD or EDA application suite. gEDA is mostly oriented towards printed circuit board design. The gEDA applications are often referred to collectively as "the gEDA Suite".
  2. The collaboration of free software/open-source developers who work to develop and maintain the gEDA toolkit. The developers communicate via gEDA mailing lists, and have participated in the annual "Google Summer of Code" event as a single project. This collaboration is often referred to as "the gEDA Project".

Zuken Inc. is a Japanese multinational corporation, specializing in software and consulting services for end-to-end electrical and electronic engineering. Zuken came into existence as a pioneer in the development of CAD systems in Japan to contribute to electronics manufacturing. The literal translation of Zuken is "graphics laboratory." Established in 1976 in Yokohama, Japan, it is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange; net sales amounted to US$216 million for the year 2011.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">KiCad</span> Free software suite for electronic design automation

KiCad is a free software suite for electronic design automation (EDA). It facilitates the design and simulation of electronic hardware for PCB manufacturing. It features an integrated environment for schematic capture, PCB layout, manufacturing file viewing, ngspice-provided SPICE simulation, and engineering calculation. Tools exist within the package to create bill of materials, artwork, Gerber files, and 3D models of the PCB and its components.

Altium Limited is an American - Australian multinational software company that provides electronic design automation software to engineers who design printed circuit boards. Founded as Protel Systems Pty Ltd in Australia in 1985, the company has regional headquarters in the United States, Australia, China, Europe, and Japan. Its products are designed for use in a Microsoft Windows environment and used in industries such as automotive, aerospace, defense, and telecommunications. Its flagship product, Altium Designer, is a software for unified electronics design.

CADAM is CAD-related software that was developed by Lockheed. CADAM was originally written for IBM mainframes and later ported to UNIX workstations, including the IBM RT PC. A variant of CADAM called Micro CADAM was also developed for PCs under DOS.

This page is a comparison of electronic design automation (EDA) software which is used today to design the near totality of electronic devices. Modern electronic devices are too complex to be designed without the help of a computer. Electronic devices may consist of integrated circuits (ICs), printed circuit boards (PCBs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) or a combination of them. Integrated circuits may consist of a combination of digital and analog circuits. These circuits can contain a combination of transistors, resistors, capacitors or specialized components such as analog neural networks, antennas or fuses.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Altium Designer</span> Electronic Design Automation Software

Altium Designer (AD) is a PCB and electronic design automation software package for printed circuit boards. It is developed by Australian software company Altium Limited. Altium Designer was previously named under the "Protel" brand.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DesignSpark PCB</span>

DesignSpark PCB is a free electronic design automation software package for printed circuit boards. Although there is no charge for the software, the user must register with DesignSpark.com to unlock the program and it displays advertisements which must be acknowledged before the user can begin working.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DipTrace</span>

DipTrace is a proprietary software suite for electronic design automation (EDA) used for electronic schematic capture and printed circuit board layouts. DipTrace has four applications: schematic capture editor, PCB layout editor with built-in shape-based autorouter and 3D preview, component editor, and pattern editor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pulsonix</span>

Pulsonix is an electronic design automation (EDA) software suite for schematic capture and PCB design. It is produced by WestDev, which is headquartered in Gloucestershire, England, with additional sales and distribution offices overseas. It was first released in 2001, and runs on Windows.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Upverter</span>

Upverter is an electronic circuit design system delivered in a web browser, which enables hardware engineers to design, share, and review schematics and printed circuit boards. It additionally features the ability to generate a bill of materials, Gerber files, and a 3D rendering. Upverter provides web-based tools for editing schematic diagrams and for laying out printed-circuit boards. It does not require payment for open-source projects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Autotrax</span>

Autotrax was a free software application that ran on DOS on an IBM or compatible PC. It was designed by Protel Systems, and was one of the first professional printed circuit board CAD applications available for personal computers. It is a freeware download and also available in a stripped-down version marketed as Easytrax.

CircuitMaker is electronic design automation software for printed circuit board designs targeted at the hobby, hacker, and maker community. CircuitMaker is available as freeware, and the hardware designed with it may be used for commercial and non-commercial purposes without limitations. It is currently available publicly as version 2.0 by Altium Limited, with the first non-beta release on January 17, 2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Proteus Design Suite</span> Electronic design automation software

The Proteus Design Suite is a proprietary software tool suite used primarily for electronic design automation. The software is used mainly by electronic design engineers and technicians to create schematics and electronic prints for manufacturing printed circuit boards.

Specctra is a commercial PCB auto-router originally developed by John F. Cooper and David Chyan of Cooper & Chyan Technology, Inc. (CCT) in 1989. The company and product were taken over by Cadence Design Systems in May 1997. Since its integration into Cadence's Allegro PCB Editor, the name of the router is Allegro PCB Router. The latest version is 17.4 – 22.1.

References

  1. Electronic Business, Volume 11. Cahners Publishing Company. 18 February 2001. Retrieved 25 March 2021.
  2. "Durch Zusammenschluß soll CAD-Markt abgedeckt werden:: Lockheed vereint P-Cad und Cadam". Archived from the original on 2018-04-15.
  3. "Archived copy". www.cadhistory.ne. Archived from the original on 15 April 2018. Retrieved 15 January 2022.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  4. Protel Shareholder News, January 2000