Generating Manufacturing Outputs for Altium PCB Designs

AW 2020-05-21

Although PCBs (Printed Circuit Boards) form the basis of virtually all electronic circuits today, they tend to be taken for granted. Nevertheless, PCB technology is accelerating. Track sizes are decreasing, the number of layers in the boards are increasing, and the design rules are changing to ensure that smaller SMT (Surface Mount Technology) devices can be handled and the soldering processes can be accommodated. The final phase of the PCB design cycle is to generate the output files needed to fabricate, assemble and test the PCB. Most product companies do not manufacture their own products but instead outsource the manufacturing.

Because the ECAD design contains intellectual property of the company, manufacturers do not use the ECAD design to produce PCBs. And this is why all ECAD applications have the capability of generating manufacturing data including: Gerber, ODB++, GenCAM, Centroid, Bill of Materials (BOM) and assembly drawings.

ENOVIA PLM Collaboration Services for Altium Designer streamlines the generation of manufacturing files. Here’s how:

Altium Designer uses an OutputJob to generate files from the PCB design. An OutputJob, or OutJob for short, is essentially a container for individually configured outputs. The designer configures the OutJob with the type of data that is required. The settings for these outputs are stored in the OutJob file, which is an ASCII file that becomes part of the project.

The configured OutJob file in Altium Designer is automatically detected by PLM Collaboration Services for Altium Designer. Each configured output of an OutJob file is added to the specified CAD object (e.g. layout). OutJobs are named as Altium Output Job in the CAD type column in the 3DEXPERIENCE Save dialog box (see image below). After saving the objects, you can review and download the Altium Output Job files in the Engineering Release app.

While saving projects, the name of an OutJob needs to be the same as the project name (e.g. ABC.prjpcb should be ABC.OutJob). Otherwise, the output jobs are not detected by PLM Collaboration Services for Altium Designer.
While saving the PCB layout, the name of an OutJob needs to be the same as the PCB name included with prefix “PCB_” (e.g. ABC.PCBDoc should be PCB_ABC.OutJob). Otherwise the output Jobs are not detected by PLM Collaboration Services for Altium Designer.
Manufacturing outputs are saved as documents in 3DEXPERIENCE. The number of documents created are based on the number of output jobs configured in Altium Designer. Each output medium creates a dedicated document.