I too disagreed with elements of both the original article and Julian's reply.  I don't believe for a moment that there is a large pool of full-time PCB Designers out there that aren't aware of ODB++ and the non-intelligence of gerber, however I can easily imagine that there are a number of Electronic Design Engineers who don't design PCBs regularly except for their own designs who might not be aware of ODB++.  Perhaps this skewed the results?

After graduating with an Electronic Engineering degree my first job was as a Front-End CAM Engineer for Graphic in the UK, in the mid nineties.  There was no extended gerber when I started and the industry was talking about creating a new intelligent format.  I felt it couldn't come soon enough!  It was difficult for me to believe that in 1995 part of my job involved translating gerber files and then going through a text file aperture list having to type in different shapes and sizes.  Aperture tables could be large, and if the job was worth more than £10k had to be checked by another engineer.  Sometimes different gerber files required different aperture tables for the same job.  Although some customers had a "standard" aperture table it was difficult to work out which one to use sometimes where you had large organisations with many different divisions such as Marconi, GEC Marconi, GEC.

All this work was repeated by the Engineer responsible for developing the test programs, so that we didn't integrate a mistake in original translation into the test for the final board.

Thankfully extended gerber and Genesis came along just as left Graphic to become a PCB Designer at Toshiba.

At Toshiba, working in a factory that assembled large volumes of boards for the consumer goods market - televisions - I had regular contact with the Assembly Engineers creating SMT, through-hole, and  hand-insertion placement programs.  I saw how they took the gerber and centroid data and again had to put intelligence back into the dumb data I'd given them.

As an Engineer I want the people receiving the data from my work to be able to read it into their systems and use it easily and quickly and I don't want to have to create a difficult job for them, and an intelligent data format is the way to do this.  I'm not too concerned if it looks like ODB++ or IPC-2581 provided it's widely accepted, used, and "open" in that anyone can create software to output and read it.

Currently I output both ODB++ and a gerber/excellon/IPC-D-356 netlist/csv file package which our purchasing department sends out to our contract assemblers and fabricators, leaving it up to them to decide which one they prefer to use.  Of course I check both before passing them on.  My preference is for them to use the ODB++ and ideally I'd like to be able to output only this however I am not in direct control of where my data gets sent.

One thing that I have certainly come across in feedback from Far-Eastern Front-End CAM Engineers who've had to contact me for queries is that although they're using ODB++ capable CAM software such as Genesis, they've had no knowledge of ODB++ files!  They've been trained only how to read in Gerber and Excellon data and when I've pointed out to them that the ODB++ data is easier, and in the case of Genesis, that it's their software's file format, they've still been very reluctant to divert from their "script".

I disagree with Jack's comment that Gerber and Excellon data files on their own are difficult to reverse engineer.  In the past this was certainly the case however some modern CAD systems have features specifically for importing Gerber and Excellon in an intelligent way that creates a netlist, and then reverse engineering a circuit diagram from this.  Pulsonix can certainly do this.  This is not a lot different from the software a PCB Fabricator may use to develop test programs at the end of the day.  Granted a parts list or assembled board from which the parts information can be obtained is needed as well.

Regards,

James

James Head BEng CID+ MIIE MIET
Senior PCB CAD Engineer
Crowcon Detection Instruments Limited
2 Blacklands Way
Abingdon Business Park
ABINGDON
OX14 1DY
Telephone: 01235 557700 extension 289
Fax: 07092024504
E-mail: [log in to unmask]


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