The Basic Manufacturing Process “Step By Step”

The following pages will provide you with a quick overview of the manufacturing processes that are involved in making a standard printed circuit board.

Before you can have a circuit board fabricated you will need to have some type of design data. Most PCB manufactures will want you to provide Gerber data with an Excellon type drill file. Both of these files types are an ASCII type format. Also, To help ensure your Gerber data matches your design system’s (CAD) data. You should provide a netlist file that your PCB manufacturer can utilize. Like an IPC-356a or IPC-356d

The other option that some shops have is that they can use a DXF output from a CAD system. This data format will have to be converted, before it can be used by most shops. Some shop will also add a conversion fee to your job. 

Please take a look at the following Process links.

Double Sided PCB Process

Multi Layer PCB Process