Electronics > Manufacturing & Assembly

Custom soldermask only on track and pads

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yabba235:

Hi !
How to get a soldermask like on the main pcb from the photo? Can it be obtained directly from Altium/Kicad or do you have to edit the gerber file?

Infraviolet:
Might not be something that can be done automatically with modern processes (that board looks like it might have been a rather old hand drawn design). But in your PCB CAD software you could try copying the wire traces and pasting the copy in to the silkscreen layer (most PCB fabs won't do multi-coloured soldermask), or if the software (like Eagle)won't let objects definedin copepr layers be copied to other layer types then trace over your traces by hand in the silkscreen layer, or export an image of the PCB's copper layer, process it to some appropriate format (dxf maybe) and reimport it in to the silkscreen layer.

Actually having solder mask only cover copper traces would be a bad idea, as the alignment won't always be perfect and then you'll have slight slivers of exposed copper to short things to or make shorting while soldering easier, unless you had the solder mask cover the copper PLUS an offset distances around all the copper.

Whales:
That board has two silkscreen colours.  You are calling one soldermask, this might actually be true (some fabs even use a second soldermask as a silkscreen layer), but just be wary that you might have to juggle terminology to get it accepted and made by a PCB fab company.

I don't know if you could do this in Altium, but I suspect you could just with a text editor and the gerbers.  Perhaps you could copy the B_Cu.gbr to be F_Mask.gbr and make a few edits to the text, then preview it in a gerber viewer?

T3sl4co1l:
Oh, these should be merged. https://www.eevblog.com/forum/altium/custom-soldermask/

CyberCityCircuits:
Hey there. Normally Soldermask is set to be a 'negative layer' This looks like it wasn't set as a 'negative layer' when generating the Gerber files or the board house didn't set their import correctly.

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