How best to export planar microwave filters from Microwave Office into Altium?

I've designed a number of planar microwave filters (6 to 18GHz) in MWO and now need to get them into Altium so that I can lay them out as part of a larger circuit.

Altium have a method for importing Gerbers and converting them to *.PCB files (they refer to this as reverse engineering) but neither myself nor the Altium tech support guy could make the procedure work. One method that does work is to import a DXF file from MWO, convert it to polygons, copper pour into the polygons and then manually place all the vias again but I'm really looking for a much better design flow than this; something that is largely automatic and less error prone would be good

As far as I can see, the available output formats from MWO are Gerber, DXF, GDSII and possibly PADS *.ASC. Can anyone suggest a clean method for doing this import/export or a conversion utility that will take one of these formats and convert it into an Altium *.PCB file?

Many thanks

OldRFguy

I also have a similar problem except I am using ADS. I designed a coupled-line filter and had to draw the complete circuit in Altium manually because I couldn't import it into Altium.

Thanks 0dBc; a helpful answer although not quite the one I was hoping for.

I've spoken to quite a lot of people in recent days trying to find a solution to this problem and, so far, the most hopeful for a long term solution was a conversation with a guy from Artwork Conversion Software Inc who write software for precisely these kind of situations. He said they would look at it over the next few months and that they might see if they could offer something so if there are others out there who are experiencing this same difficulty then it might be worth contacting Artwork.com and asking and then perhaps it might be a worthwhile commercial proposition for them to create a tool.

I always do it.
1st, in AWR set the unit to mm, then in layout window, export your layout, save as DXF format.
In Altium, create a new PCB, then import the DXF file, slect the unit to mm, and set all layers to say Toplayer,set the line width to say 0.1mm or 0.0254mm. After import, you can see a draft of your layout in Altium, then use fill or others to fill it. I always create a PCB library model for filter etc. You can add PADs to filter.
Good luck.

Great thread. I recently got altium when they had a fantastic sale going on, but have not had the time to learn how to use it. Getting MW shapes into it is a chief concern! Glad it can be done.

keep the tips coming!