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July 2016 • The PCB Design Magazine 77 Check the error messages of your Gerber viewer and act on them. Chapter 16: Standard Gerber To quote from the Gerber format specification: Standard Gerber is revoked and superseded by Extended Gerber, which is the current Ger- ber format. Consequently, Standard Gerber no longer complies with the Gerber specification. Files in that format can no longer be correctly called Gerber files. Standard Gerber files are not only deprecated, they are no longer valid. Please use Extended Gerber for all of your operations. Standard Gerber is technically obsolete. If you are still using it, you are putting your business and that of your clients and business partners at a useless risk, without benefit. Despite its name, Standard Gerber is not a defined standard for PCB data transfer: Units and aperture definitions, rather than being governed by a recognizable standard, are in an informal document, the interpretation of which is unavoidably subjective. As a result, Standard Gerber files cannot be machine-read in a standardized, reliable way. Standard Gerber requires aperture painting and copper pours, both of which create manual work in CAM, adding cost, delay and risk to the PCB manufacturing process. Standard Gerber does not support attributes. Extended Gerber files are machine readable, they do not require painting, and they do support attributes. Virtually all software reads Extended Gerber and many new implementations no longer support Standard Gerber. There is not a single good reason left to use Standard Gerber. The use of Standard rather than Extended Gerber is a self-inflicted competitive disadvantage. To quote from the specification once more: Warning: The responsibility of errors or mis- understandings about the wheel file when pro- cessing a Standard Gerber file rests solely with the party that decided to use revoked Standard Gerber, with its informal and non-standardized wheel file, rather than Extended Gerber, which is unequivocally and formally standardized. More information can be found in the Open Letter on Standard Gerber, which is on the download page at www.ucamco.com. PCBDESIGN This column has been excerpted from the Guide to PCB Fabrication Data: Design to Fabrica- tion Data Transfer. Karel Tavernier is the managing director of Ucamco. THE GERBER GUIDE, CHAPTERS 15 & 16 Battery pack components are gaining impor- tance in the fast-growing battery pack market, reaching US$65.7 billion by 2021. Yole Développe- ment (Yole) pursues its exploration of the battery world and releases this year in a new report "Sta- tionary storage & Automotive Li-ion battery packs." The battery pack is the key element of battery storage systems. Such systems are used for clean mobility in hybrid electric vehicles and battery elec- tric vehicles, and are crucial for the further deploy- ment of intermittent renewable energy sources like wind and photovoltaics. A main part of the battery pack demand will come from the automotive industry. In 2015 the demand in MWh for plug-in hybrid electric and battery electric vehicles was about 18x higher than for stationary applications. This ratio will re- main almost unchanged by 2021 because both the automotive and stationary markets will feature strong growth. Today, the development of inno- vative battery technologies is focused mainly on battery cells as a key component of the battery pack. In fact, cells represent more than 50% of the battery pack cost. From Battery Cell to Battery Pack Components, Companies are Seeking Better Margins