Proto to PCB fab

[anishkgt]

My final design is ready for the fab house. Not sure how the Gerber files are to be prepared. my board is single layer. What are the sections that i would need to generate the Gerber and send them tot he fab house.



Thanks in advance

[hans]

The best thing you can do is ask your board house. Tweaking can depend on your design and board house. But generally, you want:

Copper files for all layers, like gtl and gbl, but also inner layers (like g1 and g2 for 2 inner layers)
Soldermask files for top/bottom layers (gts and gbs - gerber top/bottom soldermask). These are actually negatives so you specify which parts should be cut.
Silkscreen files (gto and gbo - gerber top/bottom overlay)
Additionally if you want a paste stencil you also need to export paste files (like gtp and gbp)

Then it's usual to supply a board outline separately, which can be on a mechanical layer in your CAD file. Most board houses also like if you plot the board outline on all gerbers, so they can make sure the alignment between gerbers is correct.

If you're taking your design in production, ask the fab house if they will panelize the board for you.

How you actually export the right data is up to your CAD package. Generally you can find some plot options which then asks which layers you want to export, and which layers you want to export to all gerbers.
Additionally you want to check if you export in imperial or metric units. I generally choose between the 2 depending on what (dominant) grid I made the PCB on. For SMT this is usually mm.
However if you export with many digits of precision, it probably doesn't matter that much.

Edit:
You also need NC drill files. These specify which holes need to be drilled. Usually they are exported seperately.

[zapta]

My final design is ready for the fab house. Not sure how the Gerber files are to be prepared. my board is single layer. What are the sections that i would need to generate the Gerber and send them tot he fab house.



Thanks in advance

What EDA software did you use to design the board and what PCB house do you plan to use?

The answer depends on these two details.

[DaJMasta]

As said, usually the company who will be making the boards has their own set of specs for their equipment.  The last I used required a keepout layer to be generated from the software I was using to get the board outline and for single sided boards wanted generated but empty top layer files as well as a separate file for non-plated holes - their setup is designed to treat every one layer board as a two layer, so they needed the additional files even if they were blank.

For a lot of places, they'll have a PDF with guidelines, a wiki page that tells you how to generate gerbers from popular software packages, or an email contact that can give you specifics of the process.  That's probably the best place to start.

[rfbroadband]

you can use EuroCircuits

http://www.eurocircuits.com/

you can upload your zipped files and you get online DRC results/violations of your entire design as function of the technology class you selected in minutes.