Our feature this week talks about Zuken’s PCB tool redesign, and out of left field came another announcement of yet another PCB tool that has had a major facelift: Intercept’s Pantheon 7.

Much of what they describe as being new in the tool conforms to much of what you would expect from a modern interface (not to minimize the amount of work to bring a new GUI to fruition – and, harder yet, test it on all platforms).

So naturally I wondered whether there was a link with Zuken’s Design Force release (you know how sometimes one company has a release planned, and, magically, a competitor tries to scoop one week ahead? Or does that only happen in the FPGA world?), and, in particular, whether they were going head-to-head on features. Of course, it’s hard to tell in detail without actually sitting down and driving both tools, but a major difference seems to be that Pantheon is still, at heart, a 2D tool with interfaces to 3D tools. They have plans to do a full 3D integration in 2012.

In particular, it seems the major focus has been on ensuring that their existing customer base saw a seamless upgrade, with no database issues in the new version. In other words, it looks like a release focused on existing users, not so much on some other company’s users.

More detail in their release…