Here is just one opinion from a lowly circuit board designer: I would pull together anyone around you who is interested in the subject and ask them "WHAT DO WE REALLY NEED IN A SILKSCREEN?" Maybe you will discover that you only need to identify certain types of components that people down the line would care about, like connectors and test points and adjustable things like pots and switches. Maybe you can do that plus ICs and forget about discretes. Maybe just not labelling bypass/decoupling will give you enough room for the other discretes if people really want to see them (but I doubt they do) Don't just assume that a "good" design will show every little thing even if it is all crammed together and blurry. Maybe you will discover you don't really need a silk layer at all. It might depend on the product. If you have no field service beyond "pull the bad one out and slide a new one in" then does that affect how detailed the silkscreen needs to be? If boards are virtually disposable do they need any silkscreen at all? From my experience, it is more important to the assembly vendor to have a good clear unambiguous assembly drawing, and the silkscreen isn't as important once they get everything programmed and one or two prototypes have been proven to work. ASK THEM. And some CAD packages allow you to have one "moveable" RefDes on the silk layer, and another smaller RefDes on the assembly layer in the middle of the component. Try plotting a scaled up board with RefDes in the center and turn off the big silkscreen RefDes, it drastically cuts down the guesswork in my opinion. Also, PCDesign magazine had a series of articles by Mary Sugden (of the Copper Connection, Santa Clara, CA) that may help you. Good Luck, Jack -----Original Message----- From: Tamir Ben-Shoshan [SMTP:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Sunday, April 19, 1998 11:38 PM Subject: Silk limitation Hi, With the miniaturization of both devices and PCB's there is a big problem with silk description near each device (designators), some time it become to absurd that the designator is bigger than the device it self. Does anyone has any solution or idea regarding this issue? Thanks Tamir ################################################################ TechNet E-Mail Forum provided as a free service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8c ################################################################ To subscribe/unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in the body: To subscribe: SUBSCRIBE TechNet <your full name> To unsubscribe: SIGNOFF TechNet ################################################################ Please visit IPC web site (http://jefry.ipc.org/forum.htm) for additional information. For the technical support contact Dmitriy Sklyar at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.311 ################################################################