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Design007-Oct2021

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soware development manager at Gerber, and Randy Allen was the CAM front-end manager at AT&T, Richmond, Virginia. Feinberg: I'm familiar with that facility. I spent an awful lot of time there. It's now a shopping mall. McGoff: Yes. Randy Allen approached Gerber in the late 1980s and said, "Is there any way we can embed an aperture wheel and polar- ity indicators for the layers into the Gerber format?" He and Ed O'Reilly got together in South Windsor, Connecticut (because there wasn't email back then), and they exchanged ideas. ey had a two-day meeting, and they designed 274X. More trivia for you. 274X was never adopted as an industry standard. ere was no indus- try committee or board that ever approved it. It was just those two individuals who launched it because of the popularity and respect, or credit given to Gerber, and it was adopted. It's still today the most widely used format of all even though it's not intelligent. When you were talking about the legacy formats, we all shortcut our words to be fast, and we say we send the Gerber files. Well, the Gerber files phrase means about six different formats, six different deliverables. You've got the Gerber files for the layers, the photoplot- ter files; you've got the Excellon drill files, test files, netlist files, centroid data, and then you have drawings and documents and the bill of materials for the job as well. is package that's delivered constitutes multiple content in different formats, file structures; some of it's human-readable only, like a drawing file or instructions. All must then be sent to the sup- pliers, who reverse-engineers it to make it a

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