OrCAD PCB Design

Solve Your Toughest PCB Design Challenges with OrCAD

You need a dependable PCB design tool that can scale with your growing business. See why PCB design teams across the world depend on OrCAD to create high quality, reliable products. 

Over 50,000 Engineers & Counting

Instant Design Feedback While You Work

Your CAD tool should provide you with feedback when you need it, as you design, so you can make intelligent design decisions up front.  Get out of the Design – Check – Fix – Repeat cycle with the real-time design features only available in Cadence. With real-time design feedback, identify issues as they happen so you can address them when they are easiest to solve.

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Architected to Scale With You

The pace of change in electronics can be intense. You need a solution designed to keep up and grow with your needs. Stay ahead of the competition, technology changes, and innovate faster with the industry’s only fully-scalable design platform.

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Get Your Design Right the First Time

Getting boards back from manufacturing can be a nerve-racking experience, but it does not have to be. With the advanced DFM rule checking, real-time feedback, and analysis capabilities in OrCAD you can be confident your design will be up and running the first time.

Complete PCB Design Innovation Platform

OrCAD is built to support you from concept to production and beyond. With OrCAD, address all your design challenges in a single, unified environment.  Seamlessly get your design done on-time, the first-time by leveraging tools built to help you design for peak productivity, accuracy, and speed. Experience the future of PCB design with OrCAD.

CREATE

Industry Standard Schematic Capture

Design entry is powered by the world’s most used schematic capture solution, OrCAD Capture. Used on countless designs across all industries and levels of complexity, OrCAD Capture provides the perfect mix of ease of use and functionality to support your design requirements.

KEY CAPABILITIES

Easy & Intuitive

Quickly create clear and concise multi-page, hierarchical schematics with ease. Compare versions, generate bill of materials (BOM), and create pdf documentation at the touch of a button.

Integrated

Always know what changed with seamless sync of data between logical and physical. Integrated simulation engines let you perform analysis inside your schematic design environment, preventing rework and data loss.

Correct By Construction

Say goodbye to late-stage design changes with instant design feedback. Easily define and validate your design intent with real-time design rules checks, constraint definition, and pre-layout SI analysis. Then, seamlessly pass this data along to implementation—setting you up for design success right from the start.

Libraries Included

Be productive immediately with access to millions of popular CAD symbols footprints, and 3D models directly within the software. Libraries are the last thing you want to worry about and with OrCAD, you no longer have to.
DESIGN

Route with Precision and Accuracy

Over half of design cycle time can be spent in placement and routing. Complete even your most complex design with accuracy and speed with the industry’s leading PCB implementation solution and see how PCB design is meant to be.

KEY CAPABILITIES

Powerful Route Engine

Built on the Allegro PCB Editor architecture equals an unmatched placement and routing experience. 64-bit performance, real-time updates and feedback, intuitive interactive and automated routing, as well as comprehensive rules and route guidance support give you the tools needed to complete your designs fast and with confidence.

Instant Design Feedback

Don’t wait until the end of the project to find all the issues you need to fix and change. Get instant feedback as you design with on-canvas guidance and notifications, so you can solve issues before they have a chance to become an ECO.

Integrated 3D Engine

View, manipulate, and evaluate your design in 3D right from within the PCB design platform. Identify collisions, see how your design performs during flex bends, and view the effects of mechanical elements such as heat sinks and enclosures in realistic 3D. Quickly adjust and see changes update instantly.

Scalable & Extensible

As your needs grow, so can your design tool. Our unique, scalable architecture allows you to seamlessly add capabilities like advanced routing and team design as needed, all leveraging the same data model eliminating any needs for translation.
ANALYZE

Comprehensive Simulation and Analysis

Know your design is ready for production with our complete set of analysis and simulation options. Run thousands of design scenarios, identify, and fix issues before the first physical prototype is ever produced.

KEY CAPABILITIES

In-design Analysis

Analyze your data where it is. Cadence analysis is deeply connected to the PCB design platform to provide quick and accurate analysis so you can easily take action. No clunky translation or time spent pushing data between tools.

Actionable Insights

Easily visualize and identify the impact of your analysis results. From improving yield and identifying parts likely to fail to displaying results of multi-gigabit simulations, you will have the guidance you need to make the right decision based on your simulations.

Optimize and Verify

Analyze your design at all stages of the process. Identify optimizations and test design alternatives early where the cost of change is lowest. Then take advantage of our unmatched accuracy and capacity to perform final sign-off and verification, all in one platform.

SI, PI, Thermal, and SPICE

Leverage a full suite of analysis engines and explore all aspects of your design from analog mixed-signal, signal integrity, power integrity, and even thermal affects. Mix and match engines easily to meet your design requirements and move to production with confidence.
BUILD

Go to Manufacture with Confidence

Sending your design to production can be a tense experience. Many have come to expect manufacturing changes and issues to happen, slowing the design cycle and often leading to long nights and weekends for the engineering team. It doesn’t have to be that way. Go to manufacturing with confidence knowing you have been checking for manufacturing issues along the way with our real-time DFM checking and rules support.

KEY CAPABILITIES

Instant DFx Feedback

If you can’t build it, you can’t release it. Leverage real-time DFx (manufacturing, test, fabrication, and assembly) checks as you design and get instant feedback if a potential manufacturing issue will occur.

Automated Manufacturing Outputs

Generating the correct files and providing accurate and clear documentation is critical for design success. With OrCAD, ensure a smooth manufacturing process without manual effort by automatically generating your design documentation and manufacturing output files.

Effortless MCAD Integration

Ensure fit and function by seamlessly synchronizing your design with mechanical before you build. Easily communicate and track changes between ECAD and MCAD so everyone is on the same page and your project is on track for success.

DesignTrue DFM

Collaboration with your manufacturing partner early and often is key to success. Bring this collaboration into your design with the DesignTrue DFM partner program. Easily bring your manufacturing partners’ design rules into your design and build a true, correct-by-construction flow by checking your design against your intended manufacturing line as you go.
MANAGE

Your Data Where You Need it, When You Need It

Keeping track of design revisions, managing part availability and compliance, and updating your PLM can seem like another job. OrCAD provides automated capabilities to handle these necessary tasks quickly and efficiently without having to leave your CAD environment. 

KEY CAPABILITIES

Automated Revision Control

Get rid of the needless email chains and finger pointing to try and figure out who changed what when. Easily manage design revisions with automated check-in, check out, easy roll-back, and complete design version history at your fingertips.

Seamless Team Design

When working in a team, ensuring everyone is on the same page is critical. Effectively collaborate with quick and easy definition of project responsibilities and access, and seamless communication among multiple team members.

Component Sourcing and Library Management

Reduce errors and remove redundancy through the deploy of a shared library that can be accessed by your engineering team. Augment component library data with part pricing, availability and lead times, and automatically update your projects as data changes. Make your part library a competitive advantage not a design challenge.

Enterprise Integration

Your design is often part of a whole and as such, will need to be managed in a company PLM system or similar. Easily synchronize your design data with PLM and surface contextual data from PLM such as corporate-approved part numbers directly in your CAD tool and ensure a smooth transition to production.
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Products

Explore the full breadth of OrCAD technologies. Designed to scale with your needs, you can easily select the technologies required to solve your unique design challenges while maintaining a common, flexible design environment that can grow as you do.

OrCAD PCB Designer Suite

Powerful, comprehensive PCB design packages

Complete PCB Design Solutions Including:

Schematic | Layout | Routing | Manufacturing | Analysis

Starting at $1,300 / year

OrCAD PSpice Designer Suite

Advanced virtual prototyping solutions for first pass PCB success

Complete Analog / Mixed Signal Analysis Including:

Schematic | SPICE simulation | Reliability Analysis | Electro-Mechanical Sim 

Starting at $2,400 / year

Compare PCB Design Suites

Schematic Entry and Libraries
OrCAD Capture Schematic Entry
Hierarchical and Multi-Sheet Schematics
Snap Functions and Grids
Block Diagram Support
Schematic Symbol Editor
Starter Library with Integrated Cloud Library of Millions of Symbols, Footprints and 3D Models and Custom Library Creation
Comprehensive Project Hierarchy
Rule Definition and Management with Real-Time Design Rule Checking
Open Design Framework
Integrated Spice and SI Simulation
Automated Design Cache
Customizable Component Properties and Bill of Material (BOM) Creation
Graphical Design Compare
Automated Annotation/Back Annotation and Ref Des Assignment
Intelligent PDF Output of Schematic
Built-in Translators (Altium, Mentor, Eagle, more)
PCB Layout Creation and Automatic Netlist Generation within your Schematic
Advanced PCB Layout and Routing
Real-Time Design Synchronization
Cross Probing and Cross Placement of Components Between Schematic and PCB
Automated Intelligent Component Placement Using Quick Place
Component Footprint and Padstack Wizard and Editor
SKILL (programming language, runtime, macro and scripting support)
Cross Section Support and Editor with Unlimited Layers
Splitplane Support
Dynamic Shapes and Pad Suppression with Real-Time Plowing and Healing
Extended Net (XNET) Creation and Rules
Differential Pair Support
Automatically Route Nets by Pick
Interactive and Advanced Routing
Stacked Via Edit and Move
Blind and Buried Via Support
Intelligent PDF Output from Board Design
Import/Export of Cross Section, Colors, Design Rules and Parameters
Autorouting
Interactive Delay Tuning
Dynamic Heads-up Display for Critical Nets
Group Route Via Pattern and Via Array/Shielding
Segment Over Void Detection
Placement Replication
Rule-Based Design
Constraint Manager
Physical and Spacing Rules
Via-in-Pad and Pad Entry/Exit rules
Differential Pair Rules
DFx Rules and Checks
Real-time Active Design Rule Checks (DRC)
Constraint Manager Analysis Mode
Electrical Rules
Layer Set and Matched Group Rules
Propagation Delay Rules
Pin Delay Inclusion and Z-Axis Delay Support
Region-Based Rules
Differential Pairs
Definition of Differential Pairs in Either the Schematic or PCB
Differential Pair Routing
Differential Pair Rules
Dynamic Differential Pair Phase Control Rules
Dynamic Heads-Up Display During Routing
Pin Delay and Z-axis Delay