Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1417991
20 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I OCTOBER 2021 Shaughnessy: We're seeing more young peo- ple come into the industry now, fortunately, aer about 20 years of not very many new people. Do you think these new people will be more inclined to use any of the more sup- posedly hipper formats? ODB or 2581? ey say they're intelligent, bi-directional, digital from the start. Do you think it's a generational thing? Do you think that Gerber might fall off over time? What do you think? Tavernier: I think it won't fall off, because the other formats don't bring material benefits, in a sense; there is nothing in the ODB file for fabrication or assembly that is not in Gerber. Furthermore, you can put more in an ODB file, as Dirk mentioned. ODB is the Genesis CAM format, and it's not really designed for trans- ferring data between CAD and CAM. So, you have a lot of stuff in there, but in data transfer, it gets in the way. For data transfer between CAD and CAM, there's nothing in an ODB file that you won't find in a recent generation Gerber file. Why would you abandon Gerber, except for political reasons? ODB is now owned by Siemens, which is a formidable company. is may play a role if there is a fight between ODB and Gerber. But in the end, it is the soware developer community that decides and that is a whole host of small companies. You give a programmer a DPMX spec pack and a Gerber spec pack and he'll hesitate 10 milliseconds for what's he going to use. I don't think Gerber will ever go away. I think it's to the contrary. Stans: If you look back 30 years, you had special- ization. You had a designer making schematics and then the next one you had a components specialist; the other one was a layout special- ist, and he came closer to the manufacturing side as well, and then you had an embedded programmer. But now, these young electron- ics guys need to do everything. Deep special- ization goes away, and they would rather tell us, "Tell me what to do and we will do it. Tell me what material we need to use for this and this and we will use it. Give me a standard and I will use the standard." Today's designers need to do too many things. We see these same questions every day in our chat rooms. People are asking the same stupid questions they did 20 years ago. ere is no difference. Tavernier: I can concur. We are always, with the Gerber format, very open in trying to engage Ucamco provides a free online reference Gerber viewer.