OrCad 9.2.3 Purchase Advice

[Frazzled]

A friend of mine has offered to sell me his copy of OrCad 9.2.3 (I think 9.2.3) as his company has switched over to Protel and he had purchased his copy so he could work at home from time to time.

Anyway is it worth purchasing a fully licenced copy so I have an upgrade path to 10 or is this version riddled with bugs, are updates freely available any other advice on this package would be greatly appreciated.

The package contains
Capture
Layout
Pspice

Thanks for the help!!

[Frazzled]

OK so my friend has given me the disk to try and so far so good but holy cow this has a steep learning curve, I am wading through the manuals just trying to figure out how to assign a footprint to a part in CAPTURE, can anyone tell me how to do this or point me to the part of the manual where this is explained, I like to get a feel for the software before buying, but so far I seem to be in over my head.

Thanks

[dmt]

I have used Orcad version 9.0 on and off for a long time. This year I used it to design two surface mount PCB's so I am pretty familiar.
Before porting over the netlist to PCB layout you must have all component footprints assigned in schematic capture. Also, the footprint names must be known to pcb layout.
So. First thing you must have handy is the list of footprints available (or you can make your own inside layout) before you allocate them in schematic.

In schemtic capture double click the device and enter the Footprint name e.g. QAD.80M/32/WG10.00.

Then Tools/Create Netlist/Layout to generate the netlist for layout.

Does this help?

[wrenchone]

If you want everything to be OK from an ECO-type point of view, you can start from a schematic and generate a netlist, and all that. The advantage of this approach is that you can generate a bill of materials directly from the schematic, track ECOs and make docunented changes big-company style. Your reference designators on your schematics and BOMs and boards will all match automatically if your parts are correctly documented in Orcad Capture. However, Orcad makes it a bit difficult to do this. All your componentsmust be documented in Capture (a big, big effort), unless you want to use dummy values. If so, then your schematics and BOMs must be modicfied by hand to reflect the actual values used.

For about 5-6 years before my company went to the formal method of generating schematics, BOMs, and boards, I used Orcad Layout as an on-the fly layout tool. If you have a feel for layouts, this can work pretty well as long as you know the pinouts of the components you are placing. I could "bomb" a simple board pretty quickly this way in Orcad Layout, assign reference designators once the layout was done to my satisfaction, then document using Orcad schematic capture. If you are doing a simple layout (most audio boards are) I found it far less of a headache to do the layout on the fly using the appropriate footprints from the Orcad Layout Libraries (you really need only about 4 or 5 of the libraries to do this). If there was a unique component, I generated it using the Library Editor. There are enough common component outlines in the libraries so that you can work pretty quickly. It's like drawing a schematic, only using different symbols... It's not the industry standard method of generating a documented printed circuit board, but it works.