DownSteam Technologies Software

CAM350

Verify and Optimize PCB Designs for Successful Manufacturing Before completed PCB designs are transitioned to a PCB fabricator, today’s complex designs require comprehensive verification to ensure a successful and timely fabrication process.

Errors discovered during fabrication pre-processing can drastically impact product schedules and result in costly design re-spins. Fabricators can make modifications to your design data to minimize delays, but the changes may compromise the design’s integrity and intent.

Inspecting, preparing and validating a PCB design prior to release to manufacturing will result in a significant increase in efficiency. It reduces the risk of design re-spins, and most importantly, ensures successful electronic products are built faster at less cost.

CAM350 offers a complete suite of tools to import your design data, modify the data if necessary and analyse the design for potential fabrication and assembly errors.

From design through to fabrication, CAM350 streamlines the transition of engineering data into successful, physical PCBs.

Blueprint-PCB

Create Comprehensive PCB Documentation to Drive PCB Fabrication, Assembly and Inspection For the past several decades PCB CAD tools have evolved to become superlative in PCB design. However, with respect to PCB Documentation, they are woefully behind even the most rudimentary word processor or graphic editor application. Unlike the typical PCB CAD tool, BluePrint was designed from the ground up to be a documentation editor.

Use BluePrint to create fabrication, assembly, process step, variant assembly drawings or component coordinate charts.

Use assembly panel design features to design and document a custom assembly panel with mill tabs, web routes, pinning holes and fiducials.

With BluePrint, you create custom documentation to meet your specific needs. Using traditional PCB CAD methods to maintain PCB documentation for the life cycle of a product can be time-consuming and error-prone. With Blueprint ECO support, document maintenance is a snap.

After the source PCB design is revised, import the revised design data into BluePrint and changes are automatically propagated across the documentation set.

With BluePrint, the documentation maintenance effort is dramatically reduced by eliminating the tedious manual revision process required for documentation authored in a PCB CAD system.

DFM Stream

PCB designs that pass standard design rule verification within the PCB CAD system, may unknowingly contain critical flaws that derail an expedient transition to manufacturing and assembly.

Commonly, flaws are discovered prior to production when design data is being processed for PCB manufacturing or assembly.

In many cases, these flaws result in the costly time to market delays as designs are updated and reprocessed to address issues detected in pre-production. While manufacturers are fully capable of addressing minor issues, their resolutions are rarely fed back into the source CAD data.

This often results in additional rounds of modifications or design re-spins. In worse case scenarios, design intent may unknowingly be sacrificed when the manufacturer alters your source design files prior to production.

There is an array of Design For Manufacturing (DFM) solutions to analyze a design for potential flaws. Most are available only to companies with surplus budgets and dedicated staff. For the average engineer with limited resources and a lack of DFM analysis tools, the only option is to hope for the best when transferring their design to PCB fabrication and assembly.

DFMStream can be implemented for a fraction of the annual software maintenance contract typically assessed for more costly DFM solutions.