I'm with Daryl on the sim... I've been using the vsm for several years, and love it. The advanced stuff is more for calculating noise in audio ckts and such. Using Isis has cut down on development time a lot, and I can't imagine what Mr. E is complaining about. Their models are very accurate--sometimes MORE accurate than the hardware. (i.e. designed with no batch-specific errata.)

I used Eagle prior to switching to Ares. I switched because I figured it'd be nice to have just one cad package, and Eagle had a few things that really irked me. Well, Eagle fixed those things right when I bought Ares, and I'd have stayed with it had I known more.

When you sim a PIC, you typically don't sim the full ckt--you put in primitives, and stuff like that so it will sim at full speed. Full analog slows it down a LOT, so you end up with two schematics (or one that's a lot bigger and messier, with some excluded from sim and some excluded from pcb) doing it this way. As far as layout goes, Ares isn't quite up to the power of Eagle. They both have annoying quirks, but Eagle is a bit more powerful...although Ares is slowly catching up, and it is nice having just one forum to read. Oh, yeah... Eagle has a LOT more part libraries, too, but they are significantly easier to make in Ares, and a lot easier to edit too.

So, now that I have it, I'm not about to go back to Eagle...but had I known then what I know now I'd have stuck with Eagle. I like its precision and power, but it's harder to learn.

That's my 2c.