Nov.  2014Upverter  /  Altium  comparison

How does Upverter compare?

[ speed, cost, productivity ]

#0 [contents] #1 - Introduction #2 - Experiment #3 - Results #4 - Learnings #5 - ROI Analysis #6 - Conclusion #7- About Upverter

#1[Introduction]

Recently, many Upverter customers have been reaching out to share their success stories with us. When analyzing their feedback, we noticed two common recurring themes: speed and cost. Below are the five elements that were commonly highlighted in these conversations.

SPEED They’re able to iterate and complete their hardware designs faster than with other tools they’ve tried. They’ve cited several reasons for this:

1} Upverter’s interface is clean and simple, making it easy to find and engage the needed features.

2} The large central parts library provides on average 50% of the needed symbols and footprints, saving a lot of time creating parts.

3} Since Upverter is a collaborative design tool, they’re able to easily work closely with both hardware and non-hardware engineers (software, mechanical, manufacturing, and upper management). Discussions and feedback are communicated much faster and more design errors are caught.

4} They don’t spend any time on software maintenance (managing and sharing licenses, deploying software, distributing updates) and they can work from anywhere on any machine.

COST They’re spending significantly less money on design tools with Upverter and do not have any licensing constraints, as Eric Evenchick noticed during the experiment we ran to compare Upverter to other CAD software:

“LICENSING IS A REAL PAIN. DURING THE DESIGN PHASE I RAN INTO SOME VPN CONNECTIVITY ISSUES AND GOT BOOTED OFF THE REMOTE LICENSE SERVER A FEW TIMES.

YOU DON’T HAVE THIS PROBLEM USING UPVERTER BECAUSE YOU JUST GO ON THE WEBSITE AND LOG INTO YOUR ACCOUNT.”

Eric EvenchickHardware Engineer

#2[Experiment]

Every marketing team publishes reports showing how their company software will save you time and money. We like to back our arguments with data. In order to gather actual and relevant stats, we conducted our own experiment to quantify some of these results so new customers can understand the return on their investment when choosing Upverter. We pitted Upverter against Altium Designer in a design comparison. Here’s how it worked:

METHODOLOGY The PCB for a posture-detection wearable product was simultaneously designed in Upverter and Altium Designer. We used two electrical engineers with 5-10 years of experience in hardware design and their respective software tool: - Anandh Venkateswaran, Head of

Hardware Design at Upverter - Eric Evenchick, Hardware Designer,

consultant and blogger

DESIGN The product consisted of: - Bluetooth LE interface with external chip

antenna and impedance matching circuit - 9-axis motion sensor processor to track

posture - Li-Po battery charger - DC/DC converter - Micro-USB interface

SPECS A complete hardware design specification was provided to both engineers at the start of the experiment. It consisted of:

- URLs to all datasheets - A detailed block diagram - Detailed information on pin connections

between components, power supply decoupling, and all resistor/capacitor values, so the engineers would not have to read datasheets to determine these

- Board outline (The board was less than 1”x1” to create a dense design)

- Stackup - Floorplan (ie. placement guidelines for all

major components on both sides of the PCB)

- Minimum trace and via sizes - Reference design schematics for various

components

For the same design, the engineers were tasked with completing necessary symbol and footprint creation, schematic, layout, and CAM file generation.

We measured the total time spent, mouse clicks, and key strokes on each of these tasks. [ ]

#3[Results]

With Upverter, the part creation, schematic design, and PCB layout took 5 hours to complete. With Altium, the same process took 30% longer for a total time of 6.5 hours. The biggest difference being that over 50% of the required components were already available in the centralized parts library.

In terms of mouse clicks, using Upverter resulted in 6,900 actions while Altium required 9,800. The main reason behind this difference is Upverter’s modern and intuitive interface which always displays the most commonly used tools and critical information within the editor.

The number of keystrokes used with Upverter totalled up to 10,200 while Altium took 11,400 hits. This is due to the many automated processes that Upverter supports throughout the design cycle, which consequently requires less manual input from the engineers.

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TIME

MOUSE CLICKS

KEYSTROKES

#4[Analysis]

“THERE ARE 1.2 MILLION PARTS IN THE UPVERTER LIBRARY, WHILE WITH ALTIUM DESIGNER, LIBRARIES DON’T COME WITH THE PRODUCT.

THE CHANCES THAT THE COMPONENTS YOU NEED ARE ALREADY CREATED ARE MUCH HIGHER. THE ALTIUM VAULT IS REALLY LIMITED IN COMPARISON.”

After finishing their day of design, Anandh and Eric went through their experience and discussed the main issues they had to deal with. Overall, Anandh had a rather painless day and identified a couple of features that could have helped him go even faster. Eric had to deal with several problems inside Altium Designer that prevented him to design at full-speed.

“I DON’T THINK THERE ARE ANY TOOLS MISSING IN UPVERTER THAT I HAD IN ALTIUM THAT COULD HAVE HELPED ME GO FASTER.

SOME THINGS WORK DIFFERENTLY BECAUSE OF DIFFERENT APPROACHES IN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT BUT UPVERTER DEFINITELY HAS ALL THE FEATURES WE BOTH NEEDED TO COMPLETE THIS PROJECT.”

QUOTES FROM ERIC EVENCHICK

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Learn more Upverter full feature list

To match the needs of hardware engineers today, Upverter has built and deployed a number of new features that have boosted the editor’s sophistication. Teams can build anything from a simple double-sided PCBs to 14+ layers, multi-FPGA boards with Upverter.

Leveraging the work of other engineers on the platform, Upverter’s centralized parts library eliminates the need to build all your components from scratch.

Parts are easy to find, re-use, and fork, making it possible to start working on a new project right away without spending hours creating the parts that you need.

THE LINKAGE BETWEEN SCHEMATIC AND LAYOUT IN ALTIUM IS ANNOYING.

WHEN YOU REPLACE A COMPONENT IN THE SCHEMATIC AND YOU UPDATE THE DESIGNATOR, IF YOU DIDN’T COPY OVER ITS UNIQUE IDENTIFIER BEFORE YOU DELETED IT, IT WON’T BE ABLE TO LINK BACK TO THAT PART WHEN YOU SWITCH BACK TO THE LAYOUT.

}Upverter’s Schematic Capture and PCB Layout editors are always working together. The tightly-integrated environment means that when you lay down a symbol in your schematic design, the same part will be automatically ready for you to place on the layout side. To make this cross-referential workflow even faster, Upverter lets you toggle between the two editors with the tab key.

Upverter’s part creation is fast and simple. Creating all requested components took 50% of the time it

took doing it in Altium Designer.

#5[ROI Analysis]

UPVERTER monthly cost [ $99 ] yearly maintenance [ $0 ] total annual cost [ $1188 ] [3-year cost] [ $3564 ] up to 5 users

ALTIUM perpetual license [ $7000 ] yearly maintenance fee [ $2450 ] total annual cost [ $4783 ] [3-year cost] [ $14350 ] per user

25% of the cost 100% of the capabilities Designing with Upverter was 30% faster than with Altium after a full day of work with two experienced professional electrical engineers designing the same product.

The overall cost of Upverter over 3 years is 25% the cost of Altium Designer.

OVER A 3-YEAR PERIOD

COST COMPARISON / USER

#6[Summary]

#7[About Upverter]About Us We’re on a mission to make hardware less hard; to empower engineers by equipping them with world-class technology, knowledge, and support.

We are making every step of hardware design approachable, pleasant, and productive.

We believe the tools should fade into the background, freeing engineers to be truly creative

What We Build We believe it’s our duty to build tools that remove the tedium out of hardware development.

Our collaborative, web-based CAD tools make every step of PCB design easy, efficient, and pain-free.

Teams of any size can collaborate without endless email threads and bulky attachments; communication latency drops from days to minutes; and your team’s potential is fully unlocked.

Hardware Design, Accelerated.

Contact: Michael Woodworth Co-founder and CIO, Upverter mwoodworth@upverter.com Cell: 416-627-4950

Find us: upverter.com

@upverter facebook.com/upverter

https://www.linkedin.com/company/upverter