Some of these documents can be generated quite easily from an OutJob file in Altium Designer, while others require a few steps to setup. Information in mechanical layers, such as a drill table, stackup diagram, and any dimensions.Drill hit locations, which are can be delineated by plated vs.Pad locations for application of solder paste.Although they aren't visible above, they include many important pieces of information: These other layers include more information than is shown in the above image. Note that there are additional files for other layers, which will be generated when you create your Gerber files. Here, only the silkscreen layer and copper features on the top layer are visible.Ī preview of what our final PCB Gerber file will look like. The image below shows two layers from the above PCB layout. When you generate Gerber files, information in each layer will be saved in its own file, and these files can be loaded into a new CAMtastic document for inspection. The image below shows the PCB layout above translated into Gerber files and viewed in the CAMtastic viewer. Pick-and-place files for automated assembly.STEP files for importing your board into a mechanical design program.
Bills of materials in PDF or Excel format.From here, you can create a host of deliverables for your PCB, including: If we want to generate Gerber files for this PCB, we need to add a new OutJob file to the project. We only have features in 2 layers on this board (1 silkscreen layer, 1 top PCB layer), as well as vias on some nets.įinalized op-amp PCB layout with vias and silkscreen visible. The finalized layout is shown in the window below. In an earlier post, we focused on creating a schematic for a simple active amplifier, then we created a simple 1-layer PCB layout from this schematic. In this article, we'll guide you through this process and show some example tasks you might need to perform to generate Gerber files.
Altium Designer helps make the process for generating Gerber files quick and easy without forcing you to use an external program. When you're ready to create your Gerber files, you need the right set of CAM tools that can take data from your PCB layout. These files are used by PCB manufacturers to prepare stencils for photoresist exposure and subsequent etching. This was the last release made by Altium, who retired the product in favor of Altium Designer.Once you've got your PCB layout finished and you're ready to start preparing for manufacturing, one of the critical steps is to generate Gerber files. The last version of P-CAD was P-CAD 2006 with Service Pack 2, released in 2006. The P-CAD product included schematic capture, component library management, PCB layout and routing, parametric constraint solver and auto-routing capability.
A few years later, the P-CAD group was divested by selling to ACCEL Technologies, an EDA software corporation from San Diego, California, which was acquired by Protel International Pty Ltd (now Altium) in 2000. At the time of acquisition, P-CAD had an installed base of over 100,000 end users, a record at that time. In 1989, P-CAD was acquired by Cadam, which was a subsidiary of Lockheed, but was in the process of being sold to IBM. Its single biggest customer was Texas Instruments.
P-CAD's flagship products included schematic capture, logic simulation and PCB layout. At that time, Cadence was just being formed with the merger of ECAD and SGA, and Synopsys was being founded as a new start up. At that time, P-CAD was the most prolific EDA company as measured by its user base, easily surpassing established CAD companies such as Autotrol, Calma, Intergraph, Daisy, Mentor, Cadnetix, CAE Systems, ECAD, SDA Systems, etc. P-CAD went on to become the company with the biggest installed base of users of Electronic Design Automation (EDA), with over 10,000 users by 1988. The company originally raised US$500,000 from CrossPoint Venture Partners, and US$3,000,000 in a second round from New Enterprise Associates and Robertson, Coleman and Stephens. The vision of the company was to disrupt the existing hegemony of $250,000 CAD systems based on mainframe computers and custom workstations, and make electronic CAD available to the masses at a cost under $10,000. P-CAD was a play on personal computers, which were just becoming popular, following the launch of the IBM PC. Also, part of the founding team were Gregory Houston, VP Marketing, a former Calma executive, and Chi-Song Horng, Director of software engineering (later promoted as a Vice President), a former AMI software engineering manager. (AMI), a custom semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California. Both were former executives of American Microsystems, Inc.
Personal CAD Systems was founded in 1982 by Richard Nedbal and Roy Prasad.