Gerber Files Research Articles

ПРОЕКТИРОВАНИЕ ПЕЧАТНОЙ ПЛАТЫ C КОНТАКТНЫМ УСТРОЙСТВОМ ДЛЯ КОНТРОЛЯ ПАРАМЕТРОВ СЕРИЙНО-ВЫПУСКАЕМЫХ ТРАНЗИСТОРОВ

The article discusses the design of a printed circuit board of a contact device designed to control the electrical parameters of serial produced transistors. This contact device is a double-sided printed circuit board. The developed electrical circuit diagram of this device is given, the components included in it are listed. The process of designing a printed circuit board, which includes several stages, is described. The topology of a double-sided printed circuit board made using the Altium Designer program is shown. The criteria for the design of this topology are highlighted. The used circuit board layers are described. Next, based on the created Gerber files, using the high-quality production technology of a printed circuit board layout was made. In the future, a printed circuit board made in this way can be used to test the electrical parameters of transistors.

English

The development of renewable energies is essential to meet the energy demand which is growing year after year. Africa has a strong solar potential which is, however, little exploited. The development of solar photovoltaic (PV) energy will be more favored with the democratization of performance monitoring and characterization tools for PV systems. Monitoring systems are very important because they allow the monitoring of the operation and control of PV installations in order to reduce maintenance costs and avoid undesirable power supply interruptions. There are several monitoring systems, more or less efficient, proposed on the market but they are often too expensive and not adapted to all existing systems. This paper presents a low-cost electronic board for monitoring and characterizing photovoltaic systems. The designed board is based on the ATMega328 microcontroller of the open-source development platform Arduino. It is composed of four blocks that allow the acquisition of electrical and environmental parameters. The board has been tested in monitoring mode with the follow-up of a small PV solar installation. The results of these experiments are consistent with what is found in the literature. Its use in characterization mode has allowed to obtain, in real time, the current-voltage and power-voltage characteristics. Compared to the results of the IV-500W tracer, the characterization results are consistent with an RMSE of 0.81 in voltage and 0.15 in current on all points measured. The design work is completed with the PCB design on Altium designer which resulted in the Gerber file. Key words: Microcontroller, photovoltaic (PV) monitoring, PV characterization, PCB.

Gerber File Parsing for Conversion to Bitmap Image–The VINCI7D Case Study

The technological market is increasingly evolving as evidenced by the innovative and streamlined manufacturing processes. Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) are widely employed in the electronics fabrication industry, resorting to the Gerber open standard format to transfer the manufacturing data. The Gerber format describes not only metadata related to the manufacturing process but also the PCB image. To be able to map the electronic circuit pattern to be printed, a parser to convert Gerber files into a bitmap image is required. The current literature as well as available Gerber viewers and libraries showed limitations mainly in the Gerber format support, focusing only on a subset of commands. In this work, the development of a recursive descent approach for parsing Gerber files is described, outlining its interpretation and the renderization of 2D bitmap images. All the defined commands in the specification based on Gerber X2 generation were successfully rendered, unlike the tested commercial parsers used in the experiments. Moreover, the obtained results were comparable to those parsers regarding the commands they can execute as well as the ground-truth, emphasizing the accuracy of the proposed approach. Its top-down and recursive architecture allows easy integration with other software regardless of the platform, highlighting its potential inclusion and integration in the production of electronic circuits.

Gerber File Parsing and the Implementation Method of its Conversion to Bitmap Image

In order to obtain the standard image based on the Gerber file in the AOI (Automatic Optical Inspection), an implementation method is proposed by analysing and converting the Gerber file into a bitmap image. According to the command format rules of Gerber file, the approach is designed to analyse Gerber files by constructing the command regular expression of Gerber files. In order to achieve convenient access to the drawing data, the drawing data processing is performed by defining a class, then the drawing data is stored in a dynamic array and the adjustment factors are added in the drawing data at the same time to meet the further post-processing needs of bitmap image. This method can quickly analyse Gerber files, adjust drawing data and generate bitmap images.

Study of CNC System for PCB Design using Proteus

A Computer Numerical Control (CNC) system for Printed Circuit Board (PCB) design using Proteus Design Suite has been presented. A schematic diagram and single-sided PCB layout of a high voltage circuit for Geiger– Muller (GM) tube is designed using Proteus software. Subsequently, the PCB layout of the circuit is converted into Gerber files that are decoded into G-code through Flat CAM software. The G-code is introduced to the CNC system consisting of a computer, a CNC controller and a CNC machine. The code is stored in the memory of the computer and is uploaded to the CNC controller byMach3 software. The controller operates the CNC machine to perform isolation routing, drilling and milling for PCB as per the instructed design. It is noticed that the CNC system associated with Proteus makes the PCB designing process automated and easier by reducing the process of printing as well as etching. This study reveals that the proposed system can eliminate human error to achieve better accuracy and higher productivity as compared to the conventional methods of PCB design.

Estimation of the PCB Production Process Using a Neural Network

Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) are an integral part of all electronic products, and the production process for printed circuit boards is quite complex. As the life cycle of electronic products becomes shorter and shorter, and the precision and signal bandwidth of electronic products become higher and higher, the manufacturing process of printed circuit boards is further complicated. Therefore, how to pre-evaluate the production difficulty before starting the production will effectively increase the efficiency and quality of printed circuit board production.
 Gerber file is the most commonly used data format for the printed circuit board industry. This file contains most of the parameters required for the manufacture of printed circuit boards. Therefore, this study uses a neural network to evaluate new PCB products before they are produced through the production parameters that are more influential in the PCB manufacturing process. This makes it possible to evaluate the difficulty and the required production process before the new PCB product is produced. This will be very beneficial for the PCB production schedule, quality control, and cost.

Developing a Machine Vision Inspection System for Electronics Failure Analysis

Ball grid array (BGA) package components are widely used in various electronic products, as they shorten the conductive path and greatly reduce the interference during current transmission. The BGA component solder ball has little flexibility for distortion, which may cause stress concentration and solder joint cracking. Red ink dye stain analysis testing can visually analyze the cracking area and the interface of the solder joint. At present, most companies use failure analysis (FA) specialists to observe the components and circuit board end images with a microscope. As component packaging technology becomes more complex and the number of input–output (I/O) signals of the chip increases sharply, FA operations require a long time and may be misjudged due to personnel fatigue and subjective determination. This paper aims to develop a machine vision image recognition system for intelligent decision analysis to judge the severity of solder ball cracking and the cracking interface type. This system uses charge-coupled devices (CCDs) to obtain the image. First, this paper uses affine transformation compensation to perform horizontal correction, which recognizes the actual position coordinates of each solder joint, estimates the solder ball according to the Hough Circle to obtain the center and the radius of the solder ball, and then a 2-D vector map (Gerber) file is used to establish the mask, and the region of interest (ROI) in the image feature is obtained through the iterator of the pixel access program. Second, the color space is converted from red, green, and blue (RGB) to hue, saturation, and value (HSV) to reduce the effects of light variations during image capture. This paper develops the range analysis model (uses the multiple-threshold method to judge whether a particular pixel in an image has the cracking (color) feature, as well as its cracking interface), and uses a morphology filter to filter image noise (filter pixels of overlapping features). The verification results show that the system developed in this paper and FA specialists have a consistency of more than 85% in the judgment of the severity of the cracking, and the false alarm ratio and the escape ratio of the system are about 9% and 16%, respectively. Regarding the judgment result of the solder ball cracking interface type, the consistency reaches 98%, which shows that the automatic failure identification system for solder joints, as developed in this paper, can effectively assist red ink solder joint FA.

Application of Computer System in Control and Programming of a Robotized Soldering Station

This paper describes a new robotized station for soldering of through-hole elements on printed circuits boards (PCB). The general structure of this station with the SCARA type robot is presented along with the computer-based control system. The software prepared for control and for the programming procedures is described. The developed computer system software, whose structure is also presented, is applied for robot programming. The first main aim is to develop the data retrieval from the Gerber file and to use them to direct soldering robot programming. The second aim of the research presented in this paper is the application of the visual system for pads coordinate recognition. The system is presented and verified.

A new and improved electric fish finder with resources for printed circuit board fabrication

ABSTRACT We describe the circuit design, construction, and operation of a field-portable electric fish finder (an AC-coupled wide-band differential bio-amplifier with loudspeaker output). This device permits detection and monitoring of the electric organ discharges generated by neotropical gymnotiform fishes (as well as the mormyroid fishes of tropical Africa). Our design is modified from earlier versions to optimize detection performance and stability over a wider range of ambient water conductivity, including under conditions of extremely low conductivity (< ca. 10 μScm-1). Our new electric fish finder design also incorporates complete waterproofing and longer battery autonomy. We provide Gerber and Eagle files made with the electronic design automation software ‘Autodesk Eagle’ to allow researchers to order printed circuit boards directly from commercial manufacturers.

Creamino: A Cost-Effective, Open-Source EEG-Based BCI System.

This paper presents an open source framework called Creamino. It consists of an Arduino-based cost-effective quick-setup EEG platform built with off-the-shelf components and a set of software modules that easily allow users to connect this system to Simulink or BCI-oriented tools (such as BCI2000 or OpenViBE) and set up a wide number of neuroscientific experiments. Creamino is capable of processing multiple EEG channels in real-time and operates under Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X in real-time on a standard PC. Its objective is to provide a system that can be readily fabricated and used for neurophysiological experiments and, at the same time, can serve as the basis for development of novel BCI platforms by accessing and modifying its open source hardware and software libraries. Schematics, gerber files, bill of materials, source code, software modules, demonstration videos, and instructions on how to use these modules are available free of charge for research and educational purposes online at https://github.com/ArcesUnibo/creamino. Application cases show how the system can be used for neuroscientific or BCI experiments. Thanks to its low production cost and its compatibility with open-source BCI tools, the system presented is particularly suitable for use in BCI research and educational applications.

A low-cost design experience for junior-level electronics circuits laboratories through emulation of industry-printed circuit board design practice

Over a 2-year period, printed circuit board layout design and test were included in the laboratory portion of the second of two junior-level electronic circuits courses. Printed circuit board design using industry-accepted board specifications and standard industry Gerber file export experience was developed. The students’ printed circuit board design experience emulated real-world situations and cost criteria. The instructor served as the fabricator in this model of the industrial design situation. Students individually used industry standard schematic capture and layout software to develop a printed circuit board for a simplified discrete µA741 operational amplifier. The layout designs were submitted as industry standard Gerber files electronically to the instructor/fabricator for evaluation. Grades were assigned by evaluating the accuracy and cost effectiveness of the design by minimizing traces, reducing printed circuit board geometry, and limiting the number of vias, which ultimately reduces fabricator tooling cost. Feedback was provided by the instructor who acted as the industry fabricator to individual students. A single fabricated printed circuit board, designed by the instructor (and fabricated by a commercial printed circuit board manufacturer), was delivered to students for assembly and test. By delivering a single printed circuit board design to students, fabrication costs can be minimized and students can inspect the delivered board as an exemplar. Assessments of the student perceptions of knowledge of and confidence in applying printed circuit board techniques in designing and releasing a printed circuit board were conducted prior to and after the printed circuit board layout design and test. On a 5-point scale, overall student-reported knowledge increased by 2.14 and overall student confidence increased by 1.20 points. Faculty assessment of knowledge, as measured by scoring short answers to knowledge statements, correlated well with student report and showed an average increase of 2.70.

A Smart Automated Embedded Based PCB–Bare Board Testing Machine Design and Development using Flexible Flying Probe

Background/Objectives: To design an automated embedded based flexible flying probe for testing PCB bare board more accurately which is one of the toughest challenge in manual testing. Methods/Statistical Analysis: Embedded based flexible flying probe can precisely position a probe on test points with high accurateness achieved by means of microstepping motors and linear laser encoders. The probe is moved horizontally and vertically based on the command passed by stepper motor which in-turn get the information from the prototype in format of Gerber file. First the flying probe checks the connectivity between two points then if the connectivity is good it will check the next track. Findings: This novel invention of flying probes are developed from new-fangled and novel thought intended to produce fasten testing speed, improved access, and enhanced error coverage. During the testing process if the machine determines some problem in the connectivity, it read the problem and send the error report on the PC display. From the error report, we can identify the fault placed in the PCB. A log file with test results is generated & stored on the PC. Fault details are sent to display unit of PC. The PC displays the matching accuracy and fault detection. The experimental result was conducted on 3 different PCB Bare board and the testing result shows the 92% accuracy and 18% false detection rate. It is compared with the jig board tester which produces less result compared to the proposed technique. The chief confront of this proposal is low down equipment and dispensation cost, absolute testing accurateness and capability to position close to faults and faults that may source irregular breakdowns. Applications/Improvements: This machine can be used for testing any type of PCB board. This proposed work develops a smart flying probe to test PCB which will significantly decrease test times therefore increasing productivity.

Instrumented flexible active electrode matrix suitable for human-computer interface applications

We present the design of a compact, wearable and reusable, 16-channel flexible active electrode matrix suitable for long term biomedical monitoring, myo-activated prosthesis and human-computer interfaces. USB scalability together with dry electrodes enables a compact approach to the human-computer interface paradigm. The full instrumentation comprising microcontroller units, two 16-bit octal ADCs and analog signal amplification is entirely assembled on the top layer of a lightweight flexible PCB. This allows the facilitation of EMG electrodes on the underside layer. Thus the resulting system is comparable in size to the standard flexible wearable electrodes matrix commonly used for EMG applications. The Gerber files, the bill of material and the processor firmware necessary to reproduce our work as well as access to manufacturer tools for manufacturing/assembly are available (on an As-Is basis based on the most up to date GPL licence) upon on request.

Design and Development of ARM9 Evaluation Kit for Embedded Applications

In contrast with low end microprocessor, ARM9 core is quite a sophisticated processor. The Evaluation kit plays an important role in the prototype development and verification of the system design before taking to its actual system development hence it’s provide better confidence to the designer. In this paper a project for the Evaluation kit has been designed for embedded system engineer to implement and confirm the functionality of their operating systems which could lead to a comfortable deployment. The independent modules for the interfaces of the ARM9 processor have been designed and the schematics have been developed using OrCAD. From the tested schematics designed in OrCAD, the related PCB is designed using CADSTAR. An eight-layer board is designed for its signal integrity and complexity of the schematic designed. The designed PCB layer is then calibrated and Gerber files are then made and passed on the PCB board manufacturer for PCB fabrication. The PCB board made is then tested for interconnection continuity using multi-meter as the components are loaded on to the board.

Open platform, 32‐channel, portable, data‐logger with 32 PGA control lines for wearable medical device development

A compact isolated low-power 32-channel 16-bit data-logging system around an NXP ARM processor (LPC1768) and four of the linear technology octal analogue-to-digital converters (ADCs) LTC1857/58/59 is designed. The system requires only 250 mA when powered at 5 V to run at full power (including a capacitive 2.8 inch touch-screen display and 32 Gb SHDC SD memory card). The sample rate is configurable up to 1 k SPS per channel as well as voltage dynamic input up to ±10 V; additionally, 32 chip select lines (SPI protocol) individually addressable and controllable while sampling to configure user-designed programmable gain amplifiers (PGAs) are available. Collaboration is being sought to improve the software capabilities, particularly to enrich the very basic user interface and to add wireless connectivity. The code is available (under the GPL licence) at our repository, the gerber file to reproduce the PCB is available (on the As-Is basis) on request. The galvanic isolation between the power supply data connection and ADC channels makes the data-logger also compatible with the main powered PCs, hence it is suitable for the implementation of medical devices at least for the prototyping and initial testing stages.

Processing Gerber files for manufacturing printed circuit boards

The development of electronic prototypes requires the manufacture of printed circuit boards (PCBs), which its role is the support and the interconnection of electronic devices. PCBs became of vital importance when the complexity of prototypes requires the connection of a large number of components. This paper presents a technique for manufacturing of PCBs by milling machines, which is intended to reduce the time of the manufacturing process. The approach used in this work is based on image processing algorithms (dilation, erotion, and coding) and a microcontroller circuit. The results are promising, because the time required to perform the PCB is less than with other techniques used by the hobbyst.

Vision based dimension measurement method for SMT stencil

For realizing automatic and precise dimension measurement of Surface Mounting Technology (SMT) stencil,a visual measurement method was proposed based on Gerber file information. First,the real image was grabbed by line scanning camera of NUCLi 7K made by NED company and such information as size and shape was derived from Gerber file data,and the coordinates mapping between figure information coordinates system and the real image coordinates system was erected through coordinates transform of proportion,transportation and rotation for obtaining the approximate position of figures in the real image. Then Canny operator and Gray moment operator were adopted to get the pixel and sub-pixel precision edge. Finally figure fitting methods like line and circle fitting were used to fit figures in the real image for measuring figure dimension precisely. The max measure error is 0.085 4 pixel (0.91 μm) and the max STDEV is 0.028 2 pixel (0.30 μm) in the experiment,which show that: the stencil measurement method proposed in this paper is stable,reliable and of high precision,which can meet the requirements of automatic dimension measurement of SMT stencil efficiently.

An open-source hardware and software system for acquisition and real-time processing of electrophysiology during high field MRI

Simultaneous recording of electrophysiology and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a technique of growing importance in neuroscience. Rapidly evolving clinical and scientific requirements have created a need for hardware and software that can be customized for specific applications. Hardware may require customization to enable a variety of recording types (e.g., electroencephalogram, local field potentials, or multi-unit activity) while meeting the stringent and costly requirements of MRI safety and compatibility. Real-time signal processing tools are an enabling technology for studies of learning, attention, sleep, epilepsy, neurofeedback, and neuropharmacology, yet real-time signal processing tools are difficult to develop. We describe an open-source system for simultaneous electrophysiology and fMRI featuring low-noise (<0.6 μV p–p input noise), electromagnetic compatibility for MRI (tested up to 7 T), and user-programmable real-time signal processing. The hardware distribution provides the complete specifications required to build an MRI-compatible electrophysiological data acquisition system, including circuit schematics, print circuit board (PCB) layouts, Gerber files for PCB fabrication and robotic assembly, a bill of materials with part numbers, data sheets, and vendor information, and test procedures. The software facilitates rapid implementation of real-time signal processing algorithms. This system has been used in human EEG/fMRI studies at 3 and 7 T examining the auditory system, visual system, sleep physiology, and anesthesia, as well as in intracranial electrophysiological studies of the non-human primate visual system during 3 T fMRI, and in human hyperbaric physiology studies at depths of up to 300 feet below sea level.

A low-cost, universal, and cumulative gating circuit for small and large animal clinical imaging.

Image-assisted diagnosis and therapy is becoming more commonplace in medicine. However, most imaging techniques suffer from voluntary or involuntary motion artifacts, especially cardiac and respiratory motions, which degrade image quality. Current software solutions either induce computational overhead or reject out-of-focus images after acquisition. In this study we demonstrate a hardware-only gating circuit that accepts multiple, pseudo-periodic signals and produces a single TTL (0-5 V) imaging window of accurate phase and period. The electronic circuit Gerber files described in this article and the list of components are available online at www.frangionilab.org.

다중 인식기 및 검증기를 갖는 거버문자 인식 시스템

인쇄회로기판 제작에 사용되는 국제표준규격의 거버 파일로부터 부품 위치 이름을 자동으로 추출하기 위한 문자인식 시스템을 제안한다. 거버 파일은 벡터형식의 그림파일로서, 각종도형 및 기호가 문자와 혼합되어 있으며, 가로쓰기와 세로쓰기 및 역 세로쓰기가 병용된다. 거버문자인식 시스템은 거버 파일에서 문자패턴을 추출하여 분리하는 전 처리 단계와 추출된 패턴을 인식하는 인식단계 및 인식된 문자와 숫자를 조합하여 부품위치이름을 구성하는 후 처리단계로 구성된다. 특히 인식률 향상을 위하여 신경회로망에 의한 다중인식기 및 구조적 특징을 이용한 검증기를 개발한다. 본 논문에서 개발된 거버문자 인식시스템은 인쇄회로기판 조립 및 검사 장비를 위한 자동 프로그래밍 시스템에 사용되어, 전자제품 제조시스템의 생산성 향상에 기여할 수 있다. We propose the character recognition system for Gerber files. The Gerber file is the vector-formatted drawing file for PCB manufacturing, which includes various symbols, figures and characters. Also, the characters are written in horizontal, vertical, and reverse-vortical directions. In this paper, we newly propose the Gerber-character recognition system to recognize all of component names located in PCB. To improve the performance, we develop the multiple recognizers by neural networks and the verifier considering the structural features. The developed system has been installed to the auto-programming software for PCB assembly and inspection machines.