-
-
News
News Highlights
- Books
Featured Books
- smt007 Magazine
Latest Issues
Current IssueIPC APEX EXPO 2024 Pre-show
This month’s issue devotes its pages to a comprehensive preview of the IPC APEX EXPO 2024 event. Whether your role is technical or business, if you're new-to-the-industry or seasoned veteran, you'll find value throughout this program.
Boost Your Sales
Every part of your business can be evaluated as a process, including your sales funnel. Optimizing your selling process requires a coordinated effort between marketing and sales. In this issue, industry experts in marketing and sales offer their best advice on how to boost your sales efforts.
The Cost of Rework
In this issue, we investigate rework's current state of the art. What are the root causes and how are they resolved? What is the financial impact of rework, and is it possible to eliminate it entirely without sacrificing your yields?
- Articles
- Columns
Search Console
- Links
- Events
||| MENU - smt007 Magazine
Happy Anniversary, Gerber Format: Looking Ahead to Digital Innovation
January 25, 2019 | Patrick McGoff, Mentor, a Siemens businessEstimated reading time: 9 minutes
This year, we celebrate the 55th anniversary of the introduction of the Gerber machine language format. We can thank H. Joseph Gerber, the man who took manual PCB design to the next level with the automated photoplotter, for giving us this format in 1964.
At that time, America was still in shock from the assassination of John Kennedy. The Beatles toured the U.S., riding on the popularity of their number one hit single, “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Gasoline was 21 cents per gallon. “Mary Poppins” (the original) was playing in theaters. Cassius Clay defeated Sonny Liston to become the heavyweight champion of the world. The first Ford Mustang was introduced at a suggested retail price of $2,368. And Gerber Scientific Instrument Company introduced the Gerber format.
A History of Venerable Industrial Achievements
Gerber immigrated to the United States in 1940 with his mother following the death of his father during the Holocaust. Gerber started Gerber Scientific Instrument Company in 1948 to commercialize his first patented invention—the variable scale. He applied his aeronautical engineering degree to developing various solutions for industrial manufacturers.
One of Gerber’s earliest products was a large-area plotter. These were used in the automotive and aerospace industries to plot digitized body components at full scale. To make it easy for the early CAD tools to drive his plotters, Gerber decided to use a numerical control (NC) programming language developed a few years earlier at MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory. Ownership of this NC language was transferred to the Electronics Industry Association (EIA) and became known as EIA-RS274D. This is the same format that the metalworking industry used for two-axis milling.
In 1967, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in Camden, New Jersey, asked Gerber to develop an automated Rubylith cutting machine for their nascent PCB application. For those of you not familiar with the design-to-manufacturing process for PCBs at that time, Rubylith was a thick film with a red peelable layer. Design departments used X-ACTO-type knives to cut the PCB pattern at a 20:1 scale. Then, the Rubylith films were mounted on a large-format camera frame for photo-reduction to nominal size. The photo-reduction process reduced the mechanical tolerances of the cutting process.
Gerber asked the engineers at RCA about their end objective and realized that if he imaged directly on the film, the customer could bypass intermediate steps while improving quality. With RCA’s support, the photoplotter was born. There’s a lesson here. Sometimes, it makes more sense to understand and start with the ultimate desired result rather than starting with the focus on just automating a single step in the process—look at the whole forest, not just each tree alone.
Gerber created a derivative of the original format to suit his automated plotters. For example, the “T” codes in Gerber format represented tool (pen, and later, aperture) changes and the “G” codes for linear and circular motion were adopted, but certain miscellaneous (“M”) codes such as M08 for “coolant flood on” were excluded for obvious reasons.
The new photoplotters used a lamp in the photohead to project light through apertures of various sizes mechanically mounted on an aperture wheel to achieve the desired feature sizes on film. Back in the 1960s, 24 apertures pretty much covered all the features sizes and types you needed to design a PCB. Each aperture was sized for the circuit feature sizes of the time—8, 10, 12, 15, and 20 mils round—complemented by special apertures for fiducials and thermal reliefs.
Page 1 of 2
Suggested Items
Absolute EMS Successfully Recertifies ISO 9001:2015 and AS9100 Standards
03/26/2024 | Absolute EMS, Inc.Absolute EMS, Inc., an award-winning EMS provider of turnkey contract manufacturing services, is proud to announce the successful recertification of its ISO 9001:2015 and AS9100 Rev D SAE International Aerospace Standards.
Arlon EMC Receives IPC-4101 QPL Recertification
03/20/2024 | Arlon Electronic MaterialsArlon Electronic Materials has successfully completed an intensive two-day recertification audit by IPC Validation Services that examined Arlon’s manufacturing processes and testing procedures to assure that they are in conformance to the requirements of IPC-4101E-WAM1, the Specification for Base Materials for Rigid and Multilayer Printed Boards.
Northrop Grumman Honors Suppliers for Excellence
03/14/2024 | Northrop GrummanNorthrop Grumman Corporation honored more than 70 suppliers for their outstanding contributions in 2023. In an annual recognition event, the companies included women-, minority- and veteran-owned small businesses as well as those operating in underdeveloped areas.
Cicor Acquires TT Electronics IoT Solutions
03/04/2024 | Cicor Technologies Ltd.The Cicor Group has signed an agreement to acquire TT Electronics IoT Solutions Ltd, with three production sites in the UK and China.
AEM, Texas Aerospace Technologies Bolster Partnership for Latin America
02/26/2024 | AEM Corp.Canadian avionics manufacturer, Anodyne Electronics Manufacturing Corp. (AEM), is pleased to announce a partnership expansion with Texas Aerospace Technologies, a subsidiary of Texas Aerospace Services, to add AEM’s new MTP136D modern panel-mount P25 VHF FM Forest Service radio to its lineup of product offerings for their Latin American customers.