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PCB manufacturing feedback

27 Jan 2012

Boss

United Kingdom

Received my first pcb designed with DS3 back from the manufacturer and I must say it all went well. There were no issues going from DS3 to the final board. I used PCB-POOL as I have used them previously and have been very happy with quality and price. A really nice feature this time was that I did not have to produced Gerber files, PCB-POOL take the DS3 pcb file and work directly from that!

They were also thorough and queried two points, the first some missing holes on an SIL power converter, but that was correct as the manufacture did not populate the module with nc pin positions. The second was I had an extra piece of pcb area attached to the main pcb. I could not find a way in DS3 to merge pcb shapes into one, but their question was "which outline did I wish them to cut?", again no problem.

The board is double sided with through hole and smd components with an LCD piggy-backed on top of the board and an mBed module on the bottom side.

Next step is to populate the board and see if my layout is as good in real life as the 3D view!

Replies

Boss

United Kingdom
15 weeks ago

Interesting point. I know pdf files can fall over if corrupted e.g. internet downloads (which is a good point), but as you point out cannot be edited by the reader (with the right controls) so should be error protected.

PCB-POOL do obviously offer Gerber options as well, but is Gerber more secure? I haven't looked at the file detail, but isn't it just a simple text format or is that an old standard?

I guess it comes down to what process steps they take to go from DS3 to their plot/drill files and how rigidly these are followed.

So far very happy with the board and will definately use again, but will consider the Gerber option after a bit more research. Thanks

MikeBK

United Kingdom
15 weeks ago

Hi Boss,

Thanks for sharing your experiences! It is a bit dangerous giving the design files directly to manufacturer, what if they accidentaly change something and your boards come out not as they should? It is a bit like sending someone a Word document instead of a PDF. One can be easily changed (by a mistake) another is 'solid as rock' and you can be confident it will not easily get changed. The same applies to PCB design files vs Gerber files.