The Future of PADS
The PADS brand has a long, rich history and many users have been loyal customers for nearly 20 years. There have been rumors that PADS is on its way out and that is far from the truth. The PADS brand products directly address the everyday challenges and needs of thousands of independent engineers.
Before I continue, I’d like to introduce myself. I am Paul Musto and I recently joined Mentor as the PADS product line director. With over 25 years of experience in PCB systems design, I am excited to move forward with you as the industry continues to evolve. I have worked in both R&D and marketing and applications engineering roles for PCB and IC packaging tools. In each role, I emphasized time interacting with customers to ensure that our products and solutions were well aligned with customer and industry requirements.
I look forward to learning more about and from the PADS community so you’ll be seeing more of me here on the PADS blog.
New PADS PCB Design Solutions
As you may have heard, PADS Standard, Standard Plus, and PADS Professional were announced in April. Each delivers compelling offerings at a competitive price.
These new product offerings were designed to align with a certain type of user. They all include both front-end (and, yes, logic is still a supported schematic capture tool!) and PCB design capabilities. But, as you go up, you gain more high-speed, thermal, and layout capabilities.
Based on these platforms, we will begin to provide a continuous flow of new functionality and capabilities targeted for that end user. Our recent release includes support for Windows 8.1 and significant improvements in our translators. We also have a release scheduled at the end of this year that will add some very big new functionality.
The best is yet to come for all our loyal users and new users, alike. To our existing users – thank you for being a part of our community. For all that are considering PADS, we look forward to the opportunity to provide you with a tool that will grow with you as your needs continue to evolve.
What do you like most about the new PADS offerings and what do you most hope to see in future releases? If you haven’t tried the new product offerings yet, I encourage you to do so today. Try PADS Standard Plus here and try PADS Professional here.
