Last year the PCB West conference held a lively panel discussion about data transfer formats for PCB design and manufacturing. Most panelists and many audience members were enthusiastic about IPC-2581, a vendor-neutral, “intelligent” format that can potentially replace many of the various formats in use today. At this year’s PCB West September 26, 2012, two representatives of the IPC-2581 Consortium updated…

A lively panel discussion Sept. 29 revealed that PCB designers have some strong opinions about the data formats that convey design intent to manufacturing. Several audience members expressed support for the Gerber data format that has been around for over 30 years. But other audience members and panelists agreed that a more intelligent and up-to-date…

We left off last month ostensibly discussing standards and how they come to be. The first standard I worked on was IPC-D-350, one of the first of the would-be slayers of Gerber, the so-called unintelligent data format. Indeed, I’ve spent a good part of my life watching electronic data transfer formats come and go, and…

A new, broad industry consortium drives for standardization across design, fabrication, assembly and test. PCBs have changed significantly over the past three decades, yet to the surprise of many, we still commonly use 30-year-old ways of communicating design intent to manufacturing. These decades’ old data-communication formats were originally conceived to drive the emerging numerically controlled…

BOLTON, MA – Electronic data transfer formats, vital as they are, are guaranteed to elicit yawns, if not outright derision, from users. But that history isn’t deterring an industry task group from attempting to tackle the now three-decades-old problem of unintelligent schematic files. Three standards are generally used for data transfer: OBD++, which is favored by…