KiCad Schema to Mentor Xpedition

[GerardFX]

KiCad ‘schema drawing’ needs to be ‘directly usable’ by teams using MENTOR DXDesign (for schema capture) and Xpedition (for PCB activities).

How to avoid the full re-drawing and re-verification of ‘KiCad Schema’ under ‘Mentor DxDesigner’ ?

What is the available method to use (if any existing) ?

[eelik]

Have you read Can I export or convert a KiCad project to another EDA format (Altium, Mentor, Zuken, OrCAD etc.)? first?

[GerardFX]

Thanks for the link (having seen only from Altium or Eagle, in the huge amount of topics…).

Effectively the same ‘never-ended story’ whatever the ECAD are, while having no interest for them to be compatible with other ECAD’s, and ignoring Customer cost contraints (even own by the same company, or fully free … !), except if a risk is feared to lose an ‘important market’ for them…

The PCB router partners will ‘just include’ in their proposal (as usual) to redraw schema, while more than doubling the cost, forcing the customer to support such an ‘avoidable extra-cost’ (as normally not necessary to route a PCB, even for the simple ones…where KiCad could be a credible alternative…).

EDIF or Spectra files could effectively be used, while being blocked by the partner having no interest to decrease their costs (expected to be paid by the Customer…until we change our long-term partners not fitting the Projects cost constraints which are the first concrete reality not to ignore…).

[Seth_h]

KiCad exports netlists that can be read by Orcad and CADSTAR.

We have no customers who have asked for additional netlist export formats.

You have a few options:

1. Use a layout shop that uses KiCad (or Orcad or CADSTAR)
2. Support the creation of a KiCad -> Xpedition netlist exporter. This would require a license for Xpedition, which last I checked runs >$25k.

[GerardFX]

Thanks for the info, having none yet from Mentor.

Some cumulated tremendous amounts of money, charged to the customer (for a few lucky guys not suffering any economical crises or planning constraints … )

EDIF and Spectra generated from KiCad need to be confirmed to be usable by Xpedition…Presently there is an unclear situation to understand where could be the blocking points from teams using Xpedition…expecting to get the info from Mentor.

[janvi]

Many years ago, I wrote conversion from Cadnetix to Xpedition. The project end up with many remaining problems to fix manually in each schemantic. E.g. fixing random rounding errors of the Cadnetix format was always more complicated than redrawing the complete design. The reason is, that Xpedition is using a very sophisticated library format with structured data far away from others. Philosophy of the features are similar to inheritance recently introduced with 5.99 format by Wayne. If Kicad would introduce this features it would ease the library maintenance (assume features understood by the librarians) but probably this will take many new incompatible main versions to approximate. Assume all, this incompability was one of Mentors reason for self-suicide. They lost many users who cannot transfer the designs and libraries from ACE (Advanced Circuit Entry used with Microstation) to Schematic Caputure after 2002 und today to DxDesigner. The only thing to recommend for you is not to wait for any conversion tools. If using Mentor, go ahead with new project from scratch.