≡
DRC
Your design should comply to these DRC specifications to may be able to produce your board, if your board doesn't pass these DRC your order will be put on hold:
- Minimum track on copper: 0.2 mm (0.008")
- Minimum spaces on copper layers: 0.2 mm (0.008") track to track, track to pad and pad to pad
- Minimum drill hole: 0.6 mm (24 mils)
- Maximum drill hole: 5.0 mm (195 mils)
- Minimum annular copper ring around the holes: 0.2 mm (0.008") i.e. (pad or via) - (drill hole) >= 0.4 mm (0.016")
- mount drills to be at least 0.5 mm (20 mils) to your border otherwise the board edge may break when cut near such hole
- any copper parts to border 0.5 mm (20 mils), if you have connectors or tracks near border you can partially remove border line in this area, if you put tracks closer than 0.5 mm (20 mils) to your borders we can break these tracks during the de-panelization
Please check these TOP 10 MOST COMMON ERRORS beginners (and experienced customers) do:
- Sending Incomplete set of files
Please before submit your files check if you provide the complete set i.e. gerber files for all layers, NC drills and tool assignment + README.TXT - Are your PCB dimensions OK for the requested panelization?
It's typical beginner to assume that 100x80 mm will panelize twice on 160x100 mm which will lead to extra charge in price. Please reffer to PRICE web page for more info on fixing small errors, and our FAQ for panelization. - Did you ran DRC check on your boards?
If you didn't this will just add delay to your order as we review/quote only once per day from same customer, so if your files have errors we'll notify you, but if you send new files in the same day will not proceed your new files until 24 hours pass, we do this to make sure you will look carefully at your errors and will not send new files with errors in the hurry again. - Do you use available drill sizes?
Many beginners or customers who don't bother to read the FAQ send us designs with 0.3 mm or 10 mm drill sizes - Is your copper fill with plotable strokes?
This is typical beginner error to send PCB with polygone copper pour made with 1 micron or 1 mils line stroke fill. Despite this creates huge files with megabites of size, these gerbers are not usable as they are unplottable. Use 8 mils minimum as copper pour, some lame CAD products also have 5 mils as default hatck stroke width fill, which make this error very easy to be done by beginner. - Eagle users speciality
Processing yourself your files, but forgot to increased your NC drill precision, please read the special FAQ for Eagle users - Eagle users speciality
Editing drill sizes outside Eagle to make them "standard" - please don'do this it just creates DRC violations - Easy PC / PADS users specialily
Please don't generate your pads and/or vias like donuts - generate solid pads as donuts are not good for PCB manufacturing - Forgot to add border to your PCB
Please check if you have border on your copper layers - NC drill files in gerber format
Please check if your CAD generate NC drill files, we can't use drill files in gerber format
FAQ
- My cad doesn't report any violations but your stop my order and say it contains errors and doesn't pass DRC check, what could be wrong?
-
We have noticed these phonomens in some cases. They all come from some kind of XY Gerber/NC drill coordinates rounding when the board is designed on the edge of the specs. Possible reasons may be:
- you have designed your board in one units, but set your postprocessor to export your Gerbers in other units. for instance designing in metric units but exporting in Inch and vice versa, when the Gerbers are converted from one units to others this may be reason for coordinates rounding errors
- poor Gerber / NC drill precision: use 2.4 or 3.4 (some CAD products have 4.2 or 2.3 precision set as default option which is not good in all board designs). Increasing the precision makes the files bigger but more precise, the 4.2 and 2.3 formats were much more used in the past when the drill machines couldn't load files bigger than 64KB but now this 8-bit controllers problem doesn't exist, so you have no excuse to not use the more precise formats :)
- big XY coordinates, some CADs have option to add "offset" to the 0,0 board origins, this is totally wrong as making the XY coordinates bigger just increase the error from rounding. Move your board near 0,0 origin but do not make it with negative coordinates.
