Autocad in Electrical & Electronic fields?

AutoCAD is used extensively in Electrical Engineering - wiring diagrams and site plans have to be done somehow. It may not be 3D drawing, but you still need something to do the job - drawing boards are long gone.

Unless you are working specifically in Electronics, ADS and Pspice won't help one bit.

Cameron:-)

AutoCAD is drafting software. You can buy plug-ins geared towards specific disciplines or you can use it plain and customize it. Since something like

80% of the world uses AutoCAD, and you have to be able to communicate drawings electronically more and more, and you, as an engineer needs to understand the basics of AutoCAD to use the tool, it is required my a lot of employers.

Sincerely,

Donald L. Phillips, Jr., P.E. Worthington Engineering, Inc.

145 Greenglade Avenue Worthington, OH 43085-2264

snipped-for-privacy@worthingtonNSengineering.com (remove NS to use the address)

614.937.0463 voice 208.975.1011 fax

Ditto to Dons comments.

While on the subject, does anybody know a good place to look through some Electrical Engineering symbols. I seem to have found plenty where you can purchase them, but the problem is you really do not have very much of an idea as to what you are purchasing,

I do not mind paying for my library, but I object to shelling out money only to find most of the symbols are of not much use to me

Tom Grayson

line at TMnet Malaysia wrote That depends on what you do in E&E engineering. >

Some of those software packages are very good for their purpose. If you do circuit design, then probably you want something like that. AutoCAD does not replace them. AutoCAD does not do circuit analysis. That depends on the company's drafting department (if any), and on the conditions under which you may work. For example, if you need something in a big hurry, and the drafting department is busy on another hot project or has gone home for the night or week-end, and the customer is due in the next morning, and the world will come to an end if you don't have the work ready for him, then you may need to do a lot of things yourself. Suggestion: For electrical engineering, consider AutoCAD LT rather than full AutoCAD. AutoCAD LT probably will do everything that you want, and it is *much* less expensive than full AutoCAD, also easy to learn. And you can trade drawings fairly well with a drafting department that uses full AutoCAD. Talk to your company, and probably also to your company's Autodesk dealer, before deciding on AutoCAD LT, as there may be some minor incompatibilities over software release dates. AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT use a lot of computer memory, and require a fast computer in order to work at reasonable speed. You also may want a big plotter, rather than just a letter-size printer. Hopefully, you company will have all of that available. Dick Alvarez alvarez at alumni dot caltech dot edu

Wow! Thank you Cameron, Don, Tom and Dick for your respective invaluable suggestions and explanations. Well, I'm fresh graduate currently looking for a job, hence, I have no idea I will be more on electrical or electronic arena. Being fastidious will cut down the available choices. Since employing procedure takes almost a month to two months, learning AutoCad is set to continue (Learning was halted due to uncertain use of AutoCad in E&E field). Anyway, thank you very much for everyone aid.

I'm not familiar with the capabilities of AutoCad, but many of these application specific CAD programs are designed to provide input to analysis or layout apps. In some cases, they are integrated with them.

What this means is that when you insert a transistor into a schematic, for example, the CAD s/w 'knows' that it is a transistor rather then a collection of lines and circles. It has places for attributes in the component model and can provide schematic information in the form of a net list to something like spice.

Many companies require their engineers to provide input to drafting departments in some sort of electronic form. No more red and blue pencils on a hard copy.

Also, if you are working in an area that gets architectural, mechanical, structural drawings, etc. from other engineering groups, odds are that these will be in AutoCad. The electrical layout will simply be done as an additional layer on top of an architectural background. No sense in re-drawing the whole building or factory.

In microelectronics (chip design), Cadence software is used extensively for schematic capture, simulation, layout, etc. Currently, it runs only on a Unix workstations and it's quite costly for a license (not something an individual or student is going to try to acquire). Microsim used to make the "Microsim Design Center", which had a nice GUI interface, and integrated the schematic capture tool with a pspice simulator and waveform viewer. I believe Cadence purchased Microsim, though, so I don't know what low-end PC CAD tools exist now for schematic capture and circuit sim. In it's day, Microsim had a free student version, and it was less than $1000 for a full version of it for the PC.

I don't know anyone using AutoCad for microelectronics or pc board design.

Regards,

Paul

l> Is AutoCad useful for E&E engineering? Isn't this software specializes for

I use a copy of Architectural Graphics Standards and create the blocks myself.

Sincerely,

Donald L. Phillips, Jr., P.E. Worthington Engineering, Inc.

145 Greenglade Avenue Worthington, OH 43085-2264

snipped-for-privacy@worthingtonNSengineering.com (remove NS to use the address)

614.937.0463 voice 208.975.1011 fax

Same thing here Paul. At least for electronics design, digital logic, and controls, Autocad is definitely not the right tool to use, and this is coming from a guy that routinely uses Autocad Lite for mechanicals.

While Cadence products are commonly used by major corporations with deep pockets, we peons doing business from our basement commonly use Orcad for schematic capture, and any of a variety of PCB routing and layout software for our CAM purposes. For guys like us, spending $250 for an entire family of software tools (which run either under DOS or Windows) is quite sufficient, thank you, and the results meet even the demands of strict MIL drafting and documentation requirements.

Just a suggestion. Take it for what it's worth.

Harry C.