Design Verification: Verification of your design data is a critical step before submitting your job for production. Today's product complexities require PCB layout engineers to push spacing limits while laying out their board designs. Tighter tolerances can mean more expensive bare-boards, and thus the risks of scrap become more expensive as well--especially if the problems are not identified until after assembly. VisualCAM provides you with a Dynamic DfM Analysis Suite that offers 75+ Design and Manufacturing checks. A blend of traditional design related checks, like track-to-track and track-to-pad, as well as manufacturing checks, like acid traps and copper slivers, can be found within VisualCAM. Rounding out your design verification experience is VisualCAM's graphical netlist comparison with pin-point error detection. Compare your data set against any IPC-D-356 netlist, or use netlist information extracted from ODB++ or PADS ASCII files, and quickly zoom to any shorts or opens in the workspace.

Manufacturing Verification/Tooling: As mentioned above VisualCAM provides a Dynamic DfM Analysis Suite that provides both design and manufacturing related checks. The ability to save and load different rule sets allows you to verify your data against your original design spacing rules, or against your manufacturer's spacing rules. Bare-board PCB engineers and PCB layout engineers alike appreciate the more robust checking features found within VisualCAM, versus those found within traditional CAD tools. VisualCAM also helps you go beyond verification and allows you to complete your final manufacturing-related tasks with automated features like solder mask and paste mask generation. Complete production tooling can be generated using VisualCAM's Advanced Panelization capabilities. You can create unlimited panel templates to accommodate a wide range of standard panel sizes. Advanced Panelization will even let you step single designs or multiple designs within the same panel frame. Venting and thieving are fully automated and user-defined as well. VisualCAM can finalize any manufacturing process flow with a robust set of NC drill and mill capabilities, including functions such as drilled text, drilled slots, user-defined break tabs, and one of the most efficient sort engines in the industry.

Assembly Processing: There are many powerful tools on the market that are adept at extracting component footprint information from intelligent sources such as FATF, ODB++, GenCAD, or even your source CAD system's database. But what if you need to generate an assembly program and all you have to work from is Gerber data? While VisualCAM is designed to work on "intelligent" data formats like ODB++, ODB++ XML, or IPC-2581 data formats, it can still operate on traditional Gerber and NC data as well. Because of this, VisualCAM is one of the only manufacturing engineering software packages that can offer you five different automated methods to reverse engineer component footprint information from Gerber data, for the purpose of assembly pick-and-place programming. Depending on the data available to you at the time of processing, you can complete a component footprint identification process in as little as a few seconds. Even when reverse engineering interactively, most jobs can still be completed in just a few hours. You can even save and load footprint libraries, allowing you to build master libraries to help keep your output consistent. There is support for both component footprint fiducials, as well as board-level fiducials. When you complete your processing, you can output the data to a variety of formats: IPC 2581, ASCII, FATF, ODB++, ODB++ XML, or GenCAD.