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?
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 think maybe the parent commenter was being sarcastic?
Yeah, see my direct reply to them (before my comment above), I honestly don't know.