SAN DIEGO -- Numerical Innovations, a small software company, last week released a free CAM tool said to verify Gerber and drill files for PCB manufacturing.

In an interview with PCD&F yesterday, president and CEO Simon Garrison said that what makes DFMNow! interesting -- besides being free -- is that it performs

a complete netlist check and also aids PCB quotation through automation and by allowing the designer to send the RFQ right from their PC.

Excerpts:

PCD&F: How does DFMNow! differ from other DRC software offered by various board shops?

SG: Where designers often have hangups are net problems in the Gerber files, when one little segment is missing or a flash is rotated incorrectly and can cause an unknown short. On your CAD it looks perfect but the Gerber isn’t output correctly, and the typical DRC checks at a board shop won't detect this type of error.

In my experience, perhaps one out of 20 designs – maybe 5% - has one little hitch where the Gerbers aren’t outputted how they are supposed to be. Now we have the opportunity to compare the nets against the IPC netlist file, to ensure CAM that the Gerber will load and any errors caught. No one knows the design like the designer, who has probably spent hundreds of hours on it. He knows where those nets should be connected to, and is better suited than a board shop to discover a netlist problem.

You can also do your DfM and net checks to ensure the integrity of your design. Being able to run the net comparison separates DfMNow! from other products out there. And it’s offered free of charge. The designer may want net check, but the economy isn’t great. Everything else is several thousand dollars. Instead of asking management for, say, $3000 for CAM software to do this, it’s free.

Also, it is not aligned with any single board manufacturer.

PCD&F: What other features are included?

SG: It has a “Merge” feature that permits automatic merge of similar boards into a single panel. Say your company is sending out three similar boards. You can load each board into the software and it will create a panel for you. After checking your nets, you can combine the boards into one panel and send out one set of Gerbers, which allows you to avoid the extra fees that come with multiple sets of Gerbers. And the board shop can save on costs because everything is panelized.

Also, there’s a feature called QuoteNow!. When you want to send out a board for manufacture, there’s typically a checklist of 20 or 30 things like number of layers, you have to fill out for every board like number of layers, board dimensions, drill count and so on. Then you have to write up a readme.txt file for the fabricator. There’s a lot of repeated steps. QuoteNow! extracts the critical information from Gerber that a board shop wants, for example, the minimum trace, which it automatically extracts by looking for the smallest trace. It does the same for the smallest vias, the gold fingers, and so on. It then automatically compresses and sends it the board fabricator in an email to make it easy to ask for a quote. The fabricator will see exactly what the board will look like, not the Gerber files. All the board specifics are filled so the manufacturer can quickly run a quote. And the designer can send out for multiple quotes instantly.

PCD&F: What allows you to give DFMNow! away for free?

SG: We are accepting sponsorships for DFMNow! Users could see the sponsors’ ads and can contact those companies using Quote Now!, with which some sponsorships are integrated.

PCD&F: Tell us about your industry background.

SG: We’ve in the printed circuit board industry for about 15 years. We went straight from college (San Jose State University) to writing software. We developed CAMcastic for Innovative CAD Software, which was acquired by Protel (now Altium) in 2000. After working for Altium for awhile, we got back on our own, launching Numerical Innovations in 2006.

Ed.: A previous version of this story misreported the name of the quoting tool.