Sharing of Information

As a veteran of the PCB industry, specifically spending most of my career in the CAD/CAM segment; I think I can accurately describe myself as having access to a great deal of information. Also, having worked for and with every major PCB CAM software vendor, I can also accurately say I have a deep understanding of front-end engineering and data flow.

One of the things I consistently find to be an issue is the flow of information. Sharing of information from one system to the next, even one department to the next.

Back in the late 90's, Valor had the right idea and made incredible headway both from a marketing and technical perspective as they pushed the ODB++ format. Now I am not going to go into any kind of format debate, and I'll be the first to point out some of the glaring technical issues in the ODB++ format. But that's not the point I wish to make. It's the IDEA of a common format, containing information from many areas in the vertical market, being shared. In each node of the vertical market, the format can be spread across the horizontal plane of the specific engineering or manufacturing needs.

Recently, there has been interest, and progress in the area of open standards for the exchange of information in 3D CAD and mechanical engineering. See the Web3D Consortium website for details. But I think even this falls a bit short. In essence, what we need is really more of an evolution of ideology in the transfer of information. We need an exchange platform.

The complexities of communicating information across the multiple disciplines involved in the manufacture of modern electronics requires more than a simple all-inclusive data format can ever offer. We need to be able to communicate business rules along with the actual nuts-and-bolts data. Again, I think that Valor (probably by accident) got close to this when they included ERF's in the list of files exchanged with ODB++. ERF stands for Engineering Resource Files, or possibly External Resource Files or a host of other possible definitions...Valor seemed to waffle a bit on the actual definition. Whatever the acronym stands for, the files contain a set of manufacturing rules of varying complexity. As a side-note, Frontline PCB strangely seems to be moving away from ODB++ as the basis for their CAM systems.

Any software engineer out there will probably give the knee-jerk reaction of "well, idiot, we will obviously utilize XML to exchange the information." Obviously. And, have you, Mr. Engineer ever actually implemented any systems that exchange information in XML? Writing the XML is the easy part. Defining the schema in such a way as to communicate the actual intent of the data is the challenge. Again, I believe that a communication platform will eventually evolve. This platform will incorporate business rules as well as manufacturing and engineering rules. And it will also handle that pesky geometric data, too.

Considering that most North American PCB manufacturers still can't even get 100% RS-274X data, I'm not exactly expecting such a platform in the next year. However, I am currently employed by a very forward-thinking PCB software company which leads me to believe there is hope.