Many engineers today prefer to use OrCAD to create their Schematics. They then hand the resulting Netlists to the Designer, who uses P-CAD to do the PCB Layouts. The tools currently available to create Netlists from OrCAD, do not necessarily pass all of the attributes through to the PCB Designer, by way of the Netlist.

OrN2ACL is a program that creates an ACCEL ASCII Netlist - passing all attributes through to the Netlist. This gives the Designer more control over the design, allowing them to have maxium data at the layout stage.

For example, in InterPlace, it is possible to group Patterns by the Attribute 'Partition'. This Attribute can be added in OrCAD Capture, and passed through the Netlist to PCB, where the Designer can then use InterPlace to group the various Patterns - thereby reducing Design time drastically. As an example, one Partition can be the "Power Supply", one can be "I/O", etc.

Then, when the design is complete, the Designer can Renumber the Reference Designators in P-CAD, and pass the resulting information back to the engineer, by way of a Swap File (.SWP), which can be Imported to OrCAD Capture by the engineer.

This allows a bi-directional transfer of information from OrCAD to P-CAD 2004 and back to OrCAD at an unbeatable price.

Do not be fooled. The Back-Annotation algorithm used by OrN2ACL is more robust than those solutions offered for 'free', which will get confused easily - possibly causing the loss of data.

OrN2ACL is a 32-bit program that runs in a Windows 95/98/2000/NT/XP environment, and currently will work with P-CAD 2004 - Version 18 all the way back to ACCEL EDA Version 12.

There are several user selectable options which give the program flexibility, such as the ability to create a Netlist with sorted Net Names, plus more.

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