Coordinate Data Export Method of PCB Design Software

PCB design software data export

The design departments of modern electronIC production enterprises almost all use PCB software for circuit design, and the production and manufacturing departments also use a large number of automatic equipment such as chip mounters and plug-in machines for production. How to establish an effective relationship between the two, thereby improving production efficiency and reducing production costs is the goal of the process technicians.

In fact, most of the feature data required for processing equipment programming in the SMT processing production line can be completely obtained from the PCB design file, such as the location coordinates of components on the PCB, the overall description data of the PCB, and so on. We can directly export the corresponding CAD coordinate data from the PCB design file, combine it with the BOM (Bill of Material) file provided by the design department, and convert it into a chip mounting program that can drive the operation of the chip mounting equipment, and then transfer it to the control computer of the processing equipment through disk, U disk, network or RS-232C interface to directly drive the NC processing equipment. This not only saves the time for data preparation and programming, but also improves the data accuracy and eliminates errors and data incompleteness when manually processing data.

At present, there are many PCB design software in the MARKet, such as Protel and P-cad of Altium Company, PowerPCB/Pads and Mentor Expedition of Mentor Company, Allegro and Orcad of Cadence Company, Cadstar and CR-5000 of Zuken Company of Japan, etc., especially three kinds of PCB design software, Protel, Pads and Allegro, almost occupy more than 80% of the Chinese PCB design software market, in other words, If you master the coordinate data export methods of these three PCB design software, you can basically meet the challenges of most new products, which is particularly important for circuit board manufacturers undertaking a large number of outsourced products.

However, the problem is that many process technicians, especially those just engaged in the SMT industry, do not master the export method of PCB design software coordinate data, so they cannot convert CAD coordinate data into patch programs. They still stay on the original patch program editing method of finding component coordinate data on the circuit board one by one using the patch device CAMera, which seriously restricts the improvement of production efficiency and quality. This paper will introduce the export methods and steps of coordinate data of all common PCB design software in detail, so as to provide reference for process technicians engaged in related work. There are two coordinate data export methods summarized by the author:

1) Export with PCB design software;

2) Export with special CAM software.