PCB thickness info available from gerbers viewed in Viewmate?

[treez]

Hello,
Please advise if I can view gerbers of a PCB that was made in Easy PC, ie can I view these gerbers in the viewmate gerber viewer and find out what is the PCB thickness?

 

[barry]

Gerbers have absolutely nothing to do with the layer thickness. They are two-dimensional.

 

[treez]

thanks, but when I send my (Eagle Pro created) gerbers to PCB manufacturers, they somehow know what is the PCB thickness..surely the info must be in the gerbers?

I usually put the PCB thickness in the "manufacturing document", but sometimes I forget to put the thickness in there and they still work it out from the gerbers alone.

The PCB gerbers which I have now are by an engineer who used Easy PC, and he gave us the gerbers but did not say how thick the PCB was.

 

[barry]

Surely the layer thickness is NOT part of the Gerber data.

 

[FvM]

I would consider the trivial explanation that the PCB manufacturer simply used his standard technology, e.g. 1.55 mm board thickness.

Gerber data isn't layer-spanning and has no place for stackup specifications. May be you can include stackup data in ODB++, I'm not using it presently.

- - - Updated - - -

I validated, that ODB++ version 7.0 includes a stackup description (thickness of individual layers). Recent version 8.0 has also a specification of overall board thickness. If these attributes are supported by the ODB++ CAM output of a specific CAD tool or read at all by a PCB manufacturer is a different question.

It's however quite easy to place a documentation layer in the gerber data that contains all important specifications of the board.

 

[spudboy488]

The designer may have put PCB information on a fabrication drawing that was included with the Gerbers but as already said, Gerbers are 2-dimensional.

 

[marce]

When you do a PCB there is a certain amount of data that has to be provided for the manufacture of said PCB...whether you are using Gerber or ODB++ failure to provide this data will lead to numerous question from the PCB manufacturer....

I provide this and a master drawing of the PCB with overall dimensions and information pertinent to the design the drawing was done for....