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Printed Circuit Board Assembly & PCB Design Forum

SMT electronics assembly manufacturing forum.


PCB panel Gerber files

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#85194

The question about PCB panel Gerber files | 13 July, 2020

Is there any tool or process you would recommend that can take a standard stack of Gerber files (usually 2-layer, although the potential capability to support 4-layer would be nice) and bring them all together into one set of Gerber files on a combined single panel for fabrication, for pcbgogo where this is required or economically attractive. I want to do this in a way that isn't labor intensive, doesn't corrupt or change the existing Gerber files, and takes Gerber files as its input, meaning it is independent of whatever EDA/CAD software is used by different people - Altium, Eagle, KiCad, whatever - as long as they're just able to generate and provide standard Gerbers from their software.

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#85196

The question about PCB panel Gerber files | 13 July, 2020

Well obviously the answer is yes. Most people would probably do it in their CAD package. If you want to use a third party tool Fab3000 does tis as well as a whole bunch of other things you might possibly want to do when processing files supplied by other people that you want toget manufactured and then populate. e.g create stencil layers with custom apertures, create pick and place files from Gerber data etc, its not super cheap to buy but you can rent the whole suite month by month if you have intermittent need.

https://hackaday.io/project/19202-small-pcbs-for-panelizing-tutorial/log/59210-panelization-using-gerberpanelizer-on-windows-linux-possible

I've not used it but google also brings up this free tool, that appears in fact to work with raw gerber data despite mentioning Kicad all over the place..

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#85482

The question about PCB panel Gerber files | 19 August, 2020

Take a look at Viewmate. Its free and allows to evaluate, measure, etc any gerber file

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