Design and Application of CAD-CAM Data Interface in Electronic Assembly Production

For the wide application of CAD software in current electronic industry, the paper puts forward an idea of designing a kind of data interface between CAD and CAM systems, in order to achieve data sharing and data integration for various equipments in electronic assembly production. Taking component mounting/insertion machines as target equipments, this paper analyzes the data set to be processed by this data interface. Then we describe structure and format of data in a PCB source file generated by Protel, one commonly used CAD software, and discuss how to use the data interface to implement extraction and conversion of production data from a source file. The practical application proves that this data interface can greatly enhance the efficiency of the electronic assembly production.