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Design for Manufacturing: Dispense With the Gerbers Already
June 5, 2013 |Estimated reading time: Less than a minute
Why should you care how data are output from your CAD tool after you’ve completed your design, provided that the design is sound and the description is thorough?
Whether you send Gerbers to your manufacturer (along with a drill file, netlist, BOM, board drawing and readme text), a zipped ODB++ file, or a file in the IPC-2581 format when it’s finalized, what’s the difference?
How your design data are formatted determines how easily, and perhaps how successfully, your manufacturer can interpret exactly what you intend to have built. Nearly 90% of the orders my company receives for fabrication and assembly are Gerber-based, even though it was more than 15 years ago that Valor introduced the ODB++ format for intelligently describing designs at the manufacturing level.Read the full column here.Editor's Note: This column originally appeared in the January 2013 issue of The PCB Design Magazine.