Gerber PCB data shrunk 8x while maintaining 0.0001" precision.

The data described in this success story was provided by ADFLEX Solutions - Phoenix Arizona, a PCB production shop. They frequently get PCB artwork from their customers that has been converted from Gerber files.

The AutoCAD drawings created by the Gerber to AutoCAD conversion use wide polylines to represent traces. Curves in the traces are all approximated by many straight segments (like splining without the control points). These drawings usually represent high precision artwork where line widths and line spacing is critical to the PCB production process.

The example drawing met all PCB production requirements, but it was very large and consumed large amounts of production time. ADFLEX needed a method to shrink the size of these types of drawings while maintaining the very high precision and smoothness.

ADFLEX purchased our Curvefit product to accomplish this goal. The following example was taken directly from a production job. The snapshots below were generated from a small area of the PCB - before Curvefitting and after.

Original Data - Drawing Size = 1,567,793 bytes

Finished Data, after Curvefitting - Drawing Size = 187,432 bytes

Drawing Compression = 8.4 : 1 with a guaranteed Precision of 0.0001"