Mar 8

Written by:
Thursday, March 08, 2012 

As a member of the newly-founded IPC-2581 Consortium, Ucamco is validating its IPC-2581 input in its CAM and Integr8tor software. This confirms yet again its longstanding commitment to the development of unequivocal communication between PCB designers and manufacturers, for the benefit of the PCB industry worldwide.

Today's PCB manufacture demands expertise in many areas that are as diverse from one another as high-end chemistry and mechanics, physics and graphics, imaging and engineering – and the list goes on. Each area is of utmost importance to final product quality, and each manufacturing step must be accurately, precisely and repeatably carried out. Which means that each and every operation, phase, part must be designed and described in clear, unequivocal terms if the final product is to come off the production lines as it should.

Decades ago, Ucamco recognised the PCB industry's fundamental need for clear data communication, and so we took on the Gerber format, developing it over the years in response to declared user need and to our own observations on Gerber files in circulation. The latest update of the Gerber RS-274X standard, version H, released in January 2012, builds on our years of experience in the field, and is, even today, the global PCB industry's de facto standard image description format for PCB manufacturing. It is freely available for download at www.ucamco.com.

Now, as a natural progression of our long history in promoting clear communications between PCB designers and manufacturers, Ucamco has joined the IPC-2581 Consortium. Established in July of this year, the Consortium's goal is to enable, facilitate and drive the use of the IPC-2581 standard, an intelligent data file format that describes PCB and PCB assembly products and their tooling, manufacturing, assembly, and inspection requirements. By adopting and promoting IPC-2581 as an open, neutrally-maintained global standard, the Consortium aims to encourage innovation, improve efficiency and reduce costs, industry-wide.

Comprising OEMs, EDA/DFM/CAM software companies, PCB fabricators, electronics assemblers and test companies, the Consortium represents a wide range of products and services that will extend IPC-2581 deployment deep into PCB fabrication, assembly and test, allowing end users to generate a single output file that can be used right across the designer/manufacturer interface without having to be converted.

Ucamco's Managing Director Karel Tavernier comments on Ucamco's support of IPC-2581: “We believe that this standard will help our customers improve their productivity and quality. To this end, and as a market leader in PCB software (CAM and automated data analysis) and laser photoplotting systems, we were an early adopter of IPC-2581 –  we were generating IPC-2581 files just a year after its introduction in 2004. And our Integr8tor Data Analysis software has been using the standard since 2006 to describe job stackups. We are committed to support input of IPC-2581 files in our software.”