Files will also get generated for drill holes in the design, including for plated and unplated through-holes. When you go to create X2 files for your design, you can create a file for each and every layer in the PCB stackup, including mechanical layers. If the Gerber viewer/editor application you’re using doesn’t understand the Gerber format extension and can’t determine the location in the layer stack, then it will cue up the layers out of order (usually in alphabetical order). The data in these files is all ASCII data, so any number of applications can read that data and use it to generate 2D vector images of each layer. I say “usually” because I’ve received Gerbers as part of projects where the client’s engineer didn’t use the extensions shown above. RS-274-X Gerber files all different extensions, and the extension tells a specific viewer/editor program the function of each file.įor RS-274-X Gerbers, you can usually infer the function of each layer simply by looking at the extension. Under the RS-274-X standard, because there are no attributes attached to the file, the correspondence of each file to a specific layer in the PCB occurs through the extension. The extension has the general format “GXY”, where X and Y refer to a specific function and/or layer assignment for the particular file. From this list of files, we can see that they all have different extensions. The image below shows a set of RS-274-X Gerbers for an example 2-layer PCB. I’ll show the set of Gerbers I’ve generated for a product I’m designing, and we’ll be able to see what the Gerber file extensions mean by looking at the Gerber file extensions under both standards. To see where the file extensions come into play, it helps to look briefly at an example with a finished PCB layout. To read more about the pros and cons of each format, read this recent (but still relevant) blog post from Ben Jordan. One set of these files, as well as drill files, a BOM, centroid files, netlists, and a few other fab & assembly drawing files give your manufacturer everything they need to understand your board. Upon the 2014 release, UCAMCO declared the earlier RS-274-D standard “technically obsolete” in favor of RS-274-X and X2 because aperture definitions in RS-274-D are not standardized.
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