Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.
Welcome to our site! Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.
If it turns up nothing, I've always found easyPC a good program. It is very easy to use, it does lack a little flexability for really advanced artwork, but it is very good for even professional work.
Well, if u have a sound understanding of electronics, pcb layout & design rules, ORCAD is the best (in my personal opinion)for schematic simulation & conversion of schematic into PCBs as well. Though it takes time to get the hang of it, if u r willing to spare it, go go go..
Cadsoft Eagle is the best one, and I've tried just about every single one available.
It takes time to get to understand it properly, but once you do, you can make some very good boards. It also allows you to create your own component packages, which is something I find very handy.
for many circuits i have used eagle because it works perfectly in windows and linux versions and its totally free for small circuit boards. There are also other softwares but they are too expensive to build small circuits .
The question is, do you want the best FREE program, or do you want the simply best without any other conditions?
I personally started with Eagle which is great for simple stuff, but now that I use Orcad at work I would not go back since I had setup v16.5 at home, especially if you need to cram lots of components within a small multilayer board. The most important part of the layout is the ability to smoothly nudge vias and traces out of the way and very inteligent routing of traces that allows you to stick them as close as possible without painstakingly moving every singe vertex and then checking DRC over and over again until you get it right like you have to do in eagle. It does have a few quirks that could be improved in terms of user interface, but the job still gets done much much faster than it would be with Eagle or other simple pcb packages.
Another thing I like is that the footprints and schematic symbols are separate, so if you need to change a so-16 package because it causes problems with the soldering machine then you do it just once and for all parts that will use it. You could theoretically have one huge library in Eagle for all the components you use and then change the package in one place only as well, but having just a single library is quite impractical.
for many circuits i have used eagle because it works perfectly in windows and linux versions and its totally free for small circuit boards. There are also other softwares but they are too expensive to build small circuits .
After 11 yrs later (when question was asked),
I am using ExpressPCB which is free. No need to learn and you can design even 4 layer PCB for professional work.
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