Introduction

Artwork Conversion offers two useful translators for SolidWorks designers who need to make masks for either printed circuit boards (PCBs) or for integrated circuits: STL2GBR which translates STL files into Gerber for photoplotting and STL2GDS which translates STL files into GDSII for high resolution masks used in the IC industry.

Why STL?

Why use STL when SolidWorks can export DXF and there are already DXF to Gerber and DXF to GDSII translators?

It turns out that the DXF file produced by SolidWorks are generally not useful for producing a two dimensional mask. Much of the reason is that the DXF file format does not support the concept of "holes" or "voids." Therefore the resulting contours expressed in DXF do not differentiate between a contour that represents a filled region and one that represents a void.

STL, on the other hand, is a simple but complete description of a 3D body done by convering the surface of the body with triangles.

How They Work

Both of our STL translators work by "slicing" the STL body (along a user specified X,Y or Z plane at a user specified depth) and converts the resulting contours into either Gerber or GDSII as needed by the mask making equipment.

Our boolean engine is smart enough to deal with the contours that are filled and contours that are voids and to translate that information correctly into Gerber or GDSII formats.

STL to Gerber - produce mask data for PCB photoplotters.

STL to GDSII - produce mask data for IC mask writers and equipment.

Under Development

Our SolidWorks customers have asked us to look into a couple of issues that are causing them problems and which we might be able to solve.

Importing Gerber

Some of our customer which to import Gerber data into SolidWorks - either for purposes of designing mechanical enclosures or possibly for using SolidWorks as a tool to extrude the board into 3D and make various connections to simulation software.

This has turned out to be harder than one expected.

Again, the initial approach was to use a Gerber to DXF translator and then import the DXF. But this produces very bad results in most cases. [Details posted here]

So we are looking at whether we should attempt to "condition" the DXF data so that it correctly imports into SolidWorks or whether we should write a direct importer using the SolidWorks API.

Importing DXF

Our microelectronic customers have similar problems when attempting to import circuit layout data into SolidWorks. Again, we are looking whether proper conditioning of the DXF file is a viable fix or whether we need to write a custom API.