Wim,
I am sorry you feel this way. However I need to provide some additional information.
- 3D in Xpedition is not just a viewer. Our customers to Mentor 3D viewing was not enough therefore asked us to integrate a full 3D environment into the layout product.
- It support full 3D Placement Planning and Placement within the 3D View
- It's has incremental update capabilities for 98% of the changes. Thus placement, routeing, drawing will be reflected in both 2D and 3D view dynamically.
- We have full online 3D DRC for components as they are placed and moved including separate warning and error clearances.
- We have full Batch 3D DRC using the same clearance definition as online
- The system support full DRC thus when you move a part in 3D it continues to validate the clearances in 2D but then allow additional 3D validation.
- We can import 3D Models with full visualization, online and batch DRC
- We can easily map 3D component models to your existing design library. As of VX.1.2 we automated support parametric model mapping for parts in your design that do not have 3D models.
- We have full MCAD Collaboration between ECAD and MCAD using IDX and ProStep
- Ability to Export a STEP model of your design.
- I had one customer said that Xpedition 3D shaved 2 weeks off his layout schedule specific to electrical mechanical validation so the ROI is real.
You can not compare our xPCB 3D solution to pretty much all of the ECAD providers mentioned specific to functionality. Xpedition's 3D Kernel is modern (for which we pay royalties to our development partner), supporting very high performance 3D visualization and DRC. I know that some of the system you list fall apart as soon as you have a design with any real number of 3D components or imported 3D assemblies. In the end we priced all of our 3D technology ~$1000 US which is extremely low compared to other add-on's features and was made very low on purpose.
I hope this helps others understand there is a difference between technology and features specific Xpeditions 3D Layout and we are being told by our enterprise customers that what we have provided is the Cadillac of 3D EDA solutions with a very low price point.
Thanks,
Jerry