I have been discussing the advantages of a common CAD format for all manufacturing data for printed circuit boards. IPC-2581 is a new standard that is being developed for this.
Does anyone know much about this standard? I know that it has no current support from the tool vendors. Is this at all likely to be accepted in the industry? Are any vendors considering adopting it? Is there any interest from users or manufacturers?
[ "details sufficient for tooling, manufacturing, assembly, and inspection requirements. This format may be used for transmitting information between a printed board designer and a manufacturing or assembly facility."
Seems it is a downstream, manufacturing data format, not a design-database format - tho some simple CAD programs could probably use this, just like some packages are trying to use SVG as a database.
There IS a drawback in having 'intelligent' data exchanges.
Even something as seemingly 'safe' as the fill command in Gerber, opens a can of worms : you abdicate the final design control, to software that is NOT ON YOUR DESK. You CAD package can give a 100% design pass, but if the downstream SW handles fill even slightly differently, you have a broken design. KISS is not a bad thing.
So, such intelligent standards need to be treated with the right degree of caution, and care.
-jg
Another IPC boondoggle. They failed at GenCAM and they will fail again with this attempt. Design by committee just doesn't work and the IPC doesn't realize this. Along with the fact that they have nothing that industry (CAD design industry) wants and actually everything that the industry doesn't want, it ends up being transferable designs through a backdoor.
-- Sincerely, Brad Velander.
Brad Velander wrote: *** and top-posted - fixed ***
Please do not top-post. Your answer belongs after (or intermixed with) the quoted material to which you reply, after snipping all irrelevant material. I fixed this one. See the following links:
(taming google) (newusers)
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[mail]: Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net)
[page]:
Try the download section.
CBFalconer, Who appointed you to the Usenet etiquette police? Got a problem with it, take it up with Usenet. You know how far you will get! Gee, I don't see a single Usenet source amongst your irrelevant material, why not?
-- Sincerely, Brad Velander.
It is best to just ignore CB's postings on this. Just as his posts have no impact on top posting, asking CBF to stop his posts has no effect. It is just better to live and let live in the wilderness we call the Internet.
ith it,
I am aware that an earlier attempt was no successful. But why does that mean this attempt will automatically fail? Your statement that "design by committee just doesn't work" does not seem accurate. Aren't most standards done by committees? It is the rare standard that a single person (or a small design group) produces and then becomes a standard. Most are deliberate, thought out, significant efforts by representatives from the major stakeholders. The IPC standards are no exception in that area. The "committee" is made up of representatives from many of the largest companies in the field.
If this standard included nothing that the industry wants, then why are they developing it?
Yes, one of the reasons that the initial attempt failed is that the spec is inclusive enough that a design can be fully represented and therefor imported into any layout package as well as other tools. That is the power of it to the user and of course that is a concern by the tool vendors. But it is the users who buy the tools the the vendors create. I wonder how long the tool vendors can hold out if open source tools pick up the idea and carry it forward.
Rick
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tRick, I hear your points but how many successful companies or products are created by committees? Let alone committees that meet only several times per year. There is a reason for saying s like a camel is a horse designed by committee. Yes committees can write the standards but what the IPC is trying here goes beyond the standard just as GenCAM did.
It really doesn't matter what the customer wants, we (a majority of CAD designers) have wanted portability for decades now, nobody has written it into their code yet. I have seen it presented to the tool vendors so many times. And the tool vendors simply ignore it, they write a new import wizard to assist in converting your files to their software but these days I even see less and less export netlist formats from the schematic tools. Reducing or eliminating even working with a best of Schematic tool and a best PCB tool. The CAD tool vendors just won't implement it because they see it as a quick escape route for customers they otherwise view as having a significant impediment to changing tools when they might desire.
Maybe I have just become too much of a pessimist as the years go by but I prefer to look at it as realism since my experience shows me this is the way it is. I am also an IPC member, just so that you know I am not just ditzing them for some unfounded reason. They are a good organization but sometimes they reach too far and are looking through rose colored glasses. Maybe the members of this standard committee just refuse to acknowledge the vendors hardened stance against portability and keep hoping. I feel they would be best served to concentrate their efforts on working with Valor on ODB++ to improve it's facilities and commonality across the industry. And with the other vendors to have them more fully and correctly implement ODB++ within their tools, then you could work on an ODB++ import tool with those vendors as though it was a path for them to obtain new customers through providing that import capability to prospective customers. Same horse just dyed a different color.
-- Sincerely, Brad Velander. "rickman" wrote in message news:b34c52ee-4095-4735-a748-4b8dd1dfc551@z72g2000hsb.googlegroups.com... I am aware that an earlier attempt was no successful. But why does that mean this attempt will automatically fail? Your statement that "design by committee just doesn\'t work" does not seem accurate. Aren\'t most standards done by committees? It is the rare standard that a single person (or a small design group) produces and then becomes a standard. Most are deliberate, thought out, significant efforts by representatives from the major stakeholders. The IPC standards are no exception in that area. The "committee" is made up of representatives from many of the largest companies in the field. If this standard included nothing that the industry wants, then why are they developing it? Yes, one of the reasons that the initial attempt failed is that the spec is inclusive enough that a design can be fully represented and therefor imported into any layout package as well as other tools. That is the power of it to the user and of course that is a concern by the tool vendors. But it is the users who buy the tools the the vendors create. I wonder how long the tool vendors can hold out if open source tools pick up the idea and carry it forward. Rick
I'm not sure if you're being facetious or if you just don't have any clue about Usenet. At any rate, you're free to continue top-posting, but it makes you look obnoxious, and makes your posts harder to read.
-- Wim Lewis , Seattle, WA, USA. PGP keyID 27F772C1 "We learn from history that we do not learn from history." -Hegel
Wim Sorry if you have really have some difficulty reading text posted at the top of a message. What happens if there is no quoted message? Do you still have problems? Sorry that this message must obviously pose a problem for you also. Idiot!
Obnoxious is the minority that pretends there are these rules and codes of conduct restricting the free flow of information without culturally and educationally restrictive artificial boundaries. As for Usenet, it is those that keep posting these artficial silly rules and conduct and bullying others (sometimes culturally unfamiliar or just plain not well educated ro familiar with Usenet) that don't understand Usenet. Usenet is for the free and open exchange of ideas and discussion, not for a bunch of silly self-appointed dweebs to inflict their artificial rules and conduct upon other by bullying people into conforming to their artificial standards.
-- Sincerely, Brad Velander.
... snip ...
Obviously you consider a polite request to observe the behaviour standards specified for Usenet as 'obnoxious', even when the request is accompanied with references and justification. It is hard to understand such people.
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[mail]: Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net)
[page]:
Try the download section.
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IPC is not trying to create a "product" or a company. They are creating a standard for the exchange of manufacturing information. It is that simple. You have also ignored my statement that the standard committee is staffed by representatives from the various CAD companies. Why would the CAD companies create a standard that they themselves don't want? I don't see where the standard effort is inherently a bad thing just because it is done by a committee.
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Of course no one has written portability into their tools. That would allow customers to change to the tools of their competitors and done nothing to allow them to change to *their* tools. But if the playing field is level by most vendors working with this standard, then there will be a significant advantage to adding it, customer satisfaction. If most vendors support it, then the ones who don't will not win as many new customers. Yes, that will take a bootstrap of some sort. But the real advantage for users and fabricators is the utility of the standard. If used correctly, it will allow your entire design to be represented in one file instead of the many files required now. That can be enough of an advantage for customers to demand the interface.
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e tI think it is a very long row to hoe because of the resistance of CAD tool vendors and the reluctance of the contract manufacturing houses to learn a new standard. I also think it will be a painful transition as the standard will be interpreted/implemented differently by the different vendors. But given the current state of communication of manufacturing data (e.g. using a "readme" file) I expect this change is long overdue.
The transition will not be done by the small vendors like us (or should I say me?). It will only take a few of the large customers saying that want the new standard and it will be accepted by the vendors.
Rick
PS, I don't agree with the idea that posting style should be mandated. But it is certainly not worth arguing about. Just ignore things like that. Like they said in "Chinatown", "Forget about it Jack, it's just the Internet".
Gosh, this top posting is much easier to read, don't have to keep using the blasted scroll bar to see the response.
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The response the bottom posting advocates will give you is that a reply should be properly trimmed to only include the relevant portions of a quote. Notice that the quoted text in your reply was not even relevant to your reply and could have been snipped entirely except for the fact that you would quoting it as an example of top posting. But either way we had to scroll down to read it.
Bottom posting is not bad, but failure to properly trim the quotes is a real PITA. There are a couple of mailing lists where the primary participants do little or no trimming and a very, very long message results with quotes six deep and single sentence replies.
Rick
... snip ...
A horrible example is (maybe was) the Netscape help groups.
--
[mail]: Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net)
[page]:
Try the download section.
Rick, It is to create a common standard and thus a common product standard. The standard itself is not bad in my eyes, just that its' likelihood of success seems very low to me given past history. With all of it's outputs one could write a generic importer for any system generating the common output format and then there would be portability.
One CAD tool vendor doesn't make for "various CAD companies". The committee contains only Mentor and RSI, which is now owned by Mentor.
I don't know the intimate details of the prior GenCAM but it is disheartening to any future derivations that I don't believe a single company ever adopted the standard. The only reason that ODB++ exists is that it was a private venture independent of mutual industry acceptance. And don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with this standard, I just don't expect to ever see it fly because the CAD industry has shown many times that it is not really interested. But it will begrudgingly play along (maybe only partially) if the technology is driven from the down stream processes and the cries and screams of customers.
Possibly that is the reason for Valor's success with ODB++ over GenCAM. Their whole focus from the start seemed to me to be on the downstream stake holders. I don't know the details but thinking about the history I can recall that as my limited recollection. I still recall the introduction of RS-274X Gerber, many fab shops jumped on it but others were not so forward thinking and it took the actual CAD designers pushing them because we were tired of dealing with aperture lists and simple aperture errors screwing up a board here or there. Same with the CAD tool vendors, some jumped, some needing pushing.
-- Sincerely, Brad Velander. "rickman" wrote in message news:2a77f89a-7b00-49cd-a649-674880f63c55@b1g2000hsg.googlegroups.com... IPC is not trying to create a "product" or a company. They are creating a standard for the exchange of manufacturing information. It is that simple. You have also ignored my statement that the standard committee is staffed by representatives from the various CAD companies. Why would the CAD companies create a standard that they themselves don\'t want? I don\'t see where the standard effort is inherently a bad thing just because it is done by a committee.
Chuck, Where is the relevance of your references? Who created and voted on those references? They are a fools attempt to control and restrict something that in it's inception was intended to be open and unrestricted by people exactly like yourself. It is hard to understand who exactly you think you are and your role to police top/bottom posting on Usenet groups.
Your very words imply that those rules/suggestions are somehow sanctioned and official. "...to observe the behaviour standards specified..." Specified by whom, who are you or who wrote those references? You do not list one Usent reference. Show me one official Usenet document reference the use of either top or bottom posting! You're a control freak, something isn't right unless it meets your limited restrictive view of what is right or correct.
Heaven forbid you would ever subscribe to some of the groups I monitor, horrors..., they post using unicode in foreign languages. And bottom posting, sometimes you have to scroll through 3 or 4 pages of replies and counter replies just to find an original thought or addition that you haven't already read 3 or 4 times.
Let me ask, do you bottom post your emails? Now I don't know how you will answer but I have never seen anybody bottom post an email. Why not if you think it is so important to forum posts, what's the difference?
-- Sincerely, Brad Velander. "CBFalconer" wrote in message news:48E9AE97.BFF88811@yahoo.com... > > Obviously you consider a polite request to observe the behaviour > standards specified for Usenet as \'obnoxious\', even when the > request is accompanied with references and justification. It is > hard to understand such people. > > -- > [mail]: Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net) > [page]: > Try the download section.
unimportant. These references IMNSHO don't need to be "external" justifications. It's up to you to understand the idea and decide whether to follow.
nack. They thought about politeness and efficiency.
it's less a question of "restrict" but more of being polite.
I agree that top posting, maybe even with a full quote is _impolite_ to the recipient of a message (because those postings are inefficient to read).
Since there are many recipients, the sender should spend some work on the message.
BTW: This includes also proper formatting. I don't like to be pressed to trim lines when I reply. I ask a new poster _once_ to set his news client correctly. Next time I simply don't reply even if I could commit something useful.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was aware of the necessity being polite, he wrote: "Entschuldigen sie, dass der Brief so lang geworden ist, ich hatte keine Zeit für einen kürzeren." - please excuse that the letter became so long, I hadn't time for a shorter one. Today it seems to be less important.
And yes, the same applies to e-mails. Certainly I take the time to create properly written and formatted mails. What else?
Oliver
-- Oliver Betz, Munich despammed.com might be broken, use Reply-To:
on
eThis is exactly why I stopped worrying about whether everyone top posts and trims or not. The incessant reminders have the potential of turning every thread into an argument over religious beliefs on top/ bottom posting.
CBF, I have to ask, is it really helping?
sorry, that's likely a misunderstanding, my wording ("trim") was not clear:
I meant that I don't like to _reformat long lines_ as Rob Gaddi produced (although I bet Sylpheed is able to produce correct postings) to enable me putting quote marks in front of.
I did _not_ mean that I'm too lazy to delete irrelevant lines of text.
After all, I wouldn't ask someone to stop top-posting or sending long lines unless I have to tell also something on-topic. But if I reply anyway, I dare to point out that I disagree with his posting style.
Oliver
-- Oliver Betz, Munich despammed.com might be broken, use Reply-To:
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