Fabrication Drawing Details

Hello,
I have one 6 layer PCB, In layer setup, I defined each layer power, GND signal etc…But where I can add details for Fabrication Drawings? like FR-4, a Copper thickness for each layer, Mask Color(Green)?

I saw board thickness which is 1.6mm, I checked gerber files haven’t see any details regarding that.
Thanks

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You can provide these informations as a text on ECO, Cmts layer or additional text file and include together with other Gerber files. The Gerber files itself carry only information about the image of each layer.
Just ask the fab house in which form you should provide these information. Especially when you need multilayer board - layer stack info will be mandatory.

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@keruseykaryu Thanks, So once I put text on ECO and then add that layer in my Gerber .zip it should be ok.
Thanks.

You also need to tell the fab that this information is included in the eco layer!
This is best done in the mail you send them when you order your boards.
(How should they know where to look. There is no standard.)

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@Rene_Poschl I will keep in mind. Thank you.

When you have customisation like this, you had better be in written contact with your fab. This sort of thing is uncommon and is going to be expensive

At least not for Joe Average… didn’t extended Gerber and that other competitive format try to get all that meta information into the production files as well, via some standard way?
Anyhow, by the speeds stuff like this moves it’ll be in a cinema near you in 10-20 years :confused:

I faintly recall a board-fab website that let you specify different copper weights for internal versus external layers, but not on a layer-by-layer basis. I don’t know what the extra charge was for that degree of control. (I have done only one board with more than two layers.)

Dale

ANSWER 1:

These days, everybody orders boards through web sites where you specify all those things via menu selections before uploading Gerber files. Sometimes you just check a box that says “Your Standard Parameters Are Fine For Me”. (You may, or may not, find all those standard parameters listed in detail, about three levels of menus down from the Order Page.)

So it’s just an easy-peasy matter of . . . . clicky . . . clicky . . . . tappa-tappa. . . . clicky . . . bleep . . . . boing . . . and when the first time is over you ask yourself, “What’s the big deal?”, and move on to the next project. Just play the odds - more often than not, you’ll never get a call from the test guy who says (for example) “We’ve been evaluating product performance at 150% overload current, and noticed some trace delamination. What copper weight did you spec for these boards?”

ANSWER 2:

In the “good old days” (formerly known as “These trying times”, before they hired a better PR firm) the corporate “Configuration Control” folks would force you to put that information in your drawing before it was released. A paper copy of the drawing went out with the purchase order, and was a binding part of the transaction. In more recent days, various sets of these requirements were maintained as company “standards” and incorporated by reference, or a logical link into a drawing database. (In practice, many of those parameters are identical for dozens or hundreds of board designs used by a company, and can be reduced to a single file of “boiler plate”.)

The “*Dwgs.User” layer from one of my recent boards looks like this:


Forum_Example-Dwgs.User.pdf (90.3 KB)

I pack a *.pdf plot of that layer into the *.zip archive I send to the fabricator. Some vendors read the “Notes” on a drawing like this, and some don’t, so I also copy many of the “Notes” into the “Readme.txt” that accompanies the *.zip archive.

ANSWER 3:

Don’t worry about it. PC boards are, after all, a pretty low-tech, commodity product that’s been in production for over half a century. Most of that stuff doesn’t matter; it just gets in the way of finishing this product on-time. The vendor will know what works best. :wink:

Dale

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There are limitations to this. The inner pair of layers have to be the same as the base material is a double sided board. Additional layer could be varied, but asymmetry might cause warping