Gerber-RS274-X

As is so often the case with standards, the Gerber-RS274-D was nice but not good enough and so it was extended with polygon areas and mass parameters, simplifying the drawing of complex shapes. Also the aperture table was included in the coordinate list, making it possible to describe a plot with a single file. In 1998 the Belgian company Barco ETS bought GSC and became the owner of the Gerber data format. Half a year later the RS-274X Format User's Guide was published and the Gerber-RS274-X format or Extended Gerber was born.

The end of Gerber-RS274-D

A few years after the launch of Extended Gerber, Barco ETS became Ucamco; today they own the IP rights of the Gerber standard. In 2012 Ucamco decided to scrap the Gerber-RS274-D format, making it officially obsolete. Standard Gerber shall no longer be used in PCB manufacturing. Please reread the previous sentence another nine times.

Gerber-X2

The Gerber format is still being worked on to adapt it to advances in insight and PCB manufacturing technology. By including metadata intelligence has been added to the format, converting a mere image description format into an all-singing-all-dancing PCB data transfer format. This second extension—known as Gerber X2—is fully backward compatible with X1.


Conclusion

H. Joseph Gerber is probably the only person with a file format named after him. Now that you know his story and the history of the Gerber data format, you understand what the heck these aperture codes mean and why your PCB data must use at least the Gerber-RS274-X format. To see if your data is compliant with this format and if your board can be manufactured it is highly recommended to use Eurocircuits’ free online PCB Data Visualizer Tools. Also refer to these Design Guidelines to get things right from the start.

More to read

Eurocircuits PCB Visualizer
Eurocircuits PCB Checker
Eurocircuits PCB Solver
Eurocircuits PCB Configurator
Eurocircuits Panel Editor
Eurocircuits Marking Editor
Add photographs to your PCB with Eurocircuits’ PCB PIXture
BINDI pool from Eurocircuits
Smart Menus from Eurocircuits
Eurocircuits’ SEMI-FLEX pool for semi-flexible PCBs
Eurocircuits Standard Pool: very advanced and extensive technology