Back in the early 80's, I worked for a couple of circuit board fab and assembly shops, both military and commercial. One of my projects was to run through the library of drill programs (we had just uploaded them to a central PDP-11 server), and optimize the drill paths. My crude program at the time on average removed about 50% of the drill path, which in turn cut the total drill processing time by about 15% (drill tool travel accounted for about 30% of total drilling time).

Afterward, I moved on to working in the semiconductor industry, and assumed that this sort of drill program optimization would get incorporated into PCB CAD systems, so there would be little opportunity for any kind of add-on market for such a service.

During a recent career lull, I revisited this problem from a slightly different direction, and looked to see if I could find any drill programs to optimize. Just about every example I found on the web was as sub-optimal as the ones I worked with back in 1983!!

So I have composed a simple web page where circuit board fab shops can read about and submit drill programs for optimization. My newer results have routinely cut drill path by 50-80%. Back when I did my initial work, drilling was the capacity constraint for the whole fab, so any increased throughput in drill translated into overall throughput increase for the whole board fab.

The optimization works directly on the generated drill program, so there is no need to access the CAD system or any other layout layers.  Please visit my web page (http://www.geocities.com/ptmcg/drill/index.html) and see if this facility may be of interest to you.  There is also a link where you can submit one of your own drill programs, and I will generate A FREE OPTIMIZATION report and optimized drill program for you.

-- Paul McGuire
Austin, TX


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