Mike,

RS274X is wonderful from my perspective as a PCB manufacurer. When every customer has their own unique aperture list and way of describing thermals, odd patterns, etc., the time to move a job into production from the front end increases as does the risk of error. Embedding the apertures is a great way of getting your board to look like your design database.

While I'm on the subject, have the designer output an IPC-356 netlist. This allows the PCB manufacturer to assure your netlist integrity throughout the manufaturing process. Golden board works great as long as the "golden board" is perfect. Sometimes they're not! The netlist info guarantees you a board wired like your design database.

These zero length errors in the RS-274X data are probably normal output from the design software. Most CAM software should allow you to assign a one mil aperture to any zero length info as a default. This allows the data to read in without errors.

Regards,


Doug Smith
Technical Support Engineer
Yamamoto Mfg. (USA), Inc.

(408)944-8308
[log in to unmask]

>>> "Hiteshew, Michael" <[log in to unmask]@yusa.com> 03/24 8:20 AM >>>
> Steve Gregory wrote:
        <snip>
        ...yes there may some apertures that aren't
> loading, but maybe they're not supposed to...for whatever reason. Why
> there
> would be apertures in a gerber file that's not supposed to be used I have
> no
> clue...but I've had files like that before...
        <snip>

     Steve,
        Some of the cad software I've used will try to process data into the
gerber
     file that the user has "zero'd out", or given a zero length, width,
diameter or hieght
     attribute to. These show up in the gerber anyway, usually as draws or
flashes of
     the smallest available aperture. This is possibly what you're seeing.
        I'd like to use this opportunity to ask how RS274X format is being
received.
    Would anyone like to respond as to whether you you find it easier to
work with
    compared to standard gerber and aperture table formats?
        Also, I'd like to ask what data compression format is preferred.
From the
    choices of PKzip(file.zip), GNU zip (file.gz), or unix tar and compress
(file.tar.Z)
    which would you most like to have?

   - Mike Hiteshew

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