I have been using Traxmaker for a few years.  It is a great program and is
reasonably priced.  It is actually an older version of Tango that used to sell
for a few thousand dollars about 7-8 years ago.  The Traxmaker people apparently
bought the rights to the old code.  The fact that it is a few year old
technology doesn't really matter much for most of us.  If you are designing a
700MHz Pentium board with 10 layers it makes a difference, but 99% of us don't
need a program that can do that.

I have a few very minor complaints.  I am currently doing my design directly
with Traxmaker without doing a schematic first and importing the netlist.  The
old Tango used to let you do a rats nest connection from pin to pin that would
just draw a straight line between the connected pins.  When you were done you
could make it route.

For some reason they took that away and now you have to do a semi-auto route.
You click on one pin, then click on the next pin and it routes each trace right
then.  The problem with that is that you don't wind up with an optimized route.
If you start with component placements and a netlist the program will do the
simple direct routes first, the single via routes next, and on down the line.
This gives you much better routing than the semi-auto mode.  To get around this
I usually place the components and save the board.  Save it again under a new
name, route the board in semi-auto mode, save the netlist than open the original
board import the netlist, and do an auto route.  All of this should be avoided
if you use a schematic editor and import that netlist.

Anyway, asid from this minor shortcoming I would highly recommend it.

For what it's worth, I would also highly not recommend Electronics Workbench.  I
made the mistake of buying it to do my schematics in.  They will import into
Traxmaker just fine, but it totally useless to me because they don't have any 18
pin dips or 28 pin skinny DIPs.  They also have no way to make a new component
so I can't use it for PIC projects.  It does seem to be a decent mixed signal
simulation software though.  Anyone want to by my licensed copy cheap?

Roland Andrag wrote:

> Hello everyone...
>
> Has anyone on the list used CircuitMaker and Traxmaker by MicroCode? If you
> have, I would like to hear some comments, since I may buy it.
>
> I have spent a few hours on the demo versions, and I could not see any
> obvious problems, and found it MUCH more intuitive than EAGLE. I was able to
> define packages etc. quite easily, and the routing of traces etc worked
> well.
>
> Am I missing something, or is this actually a good program at a more or less
> reasonable price?
>
> Thanks
>  Roland