Artwork has recently been tasked with supporting equipment that is required to process very large Gerber (RS274X) files -- on the order of 300 MB up to 2GB -- and to produce extremely high resolution raster images (from 50,000 DPI to 190,000 dpi) This is generally much larger input files and much higher resolution than is typically needed for a PCB imaging or inspection machine.

In order to determine if our current RIP was up to the job (or whether we needed to come up with new algorithms and approaches) we generated some very large Gerber files and proceeded to run the RIP at different DPIs.

The Setup

We used the following equipment and procedures to run this benchmark:

Command Line

All tests were run using the command line and the times were extracted from the log files:

C:\WCAD\GBRIP\gbr2tiff.exe 325mb.gbr -274x -mm -pack:325mb_150k.tif -dpi:150000 -aw -ram:256
C:\WCAD\GBRIP\gbr2tiff.exe 325mb.gbr -274x -mm -pack:325mb_100k.tif -dpi:100000 -aw -ram:256
C:\WCAD\GBRIP\gbr2tiff.exe 325mb.gbr -274x -mm -pack:325mb_75k.tif  -dpi:75000  -aw -ram:256
C:\WCAD\GBRIP\gbr2tiff.exe 325mb.gbr -274x -mm -pack:325mb_190k.tif -dpi:190000 -aw -ram:256
C:\WCAD\GBRIP\gbr2tiff.exe 730mb.gbr -274x -mm -pack:730mb_50k.tif  -dpi:50000  -aw -ram:256
C:\WCAD\GBRIP\gbr2tiff.exe 730mb.gbr -274x -mm -pack:730mb_150k.tif -dpi:150000 -aw -ram:256
C:\WCAD\GBRIP\gbr2tiff.exe 730mb.gbr -274x -mm -pack:730mb_75k.tif  -dpi:75000  -aw -ram:256
C:\WCAD\GBRIP\gbr2tiff.exe 730mb.gbr -274x -mm -pack:730mb_100k.tif -dpi:100000 -aw -ram:256
C:\WCAD\GBRIP\gbr2tiff.exe 730mb.gbr -274x -mm -pack:730mb_190k.tif -dpi:190000 -aw -ram:256 

The output file is a monochrome TIFF image compressed using packbits