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Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2015 09:09:35 -0800
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Subject: Re: [geda-user] Interchange formats
From: "Britton Kerin (britton DOT kerin AT gmail DOT com)" <geda-user AT delorie DOT com>
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On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 6:34 PM, Cirilo Bernardo
(cirilo_bernardo AT yahoo DOT com) <geda-user AT delorie DOT com> wrote:
> STEP is a different beast altogether and historically the effort
> was in IGES and driven by US government contracts and an effort
> to unify design and manufacturing files and ultimately reduce
> manufacturing costs by having a standard interchange format for
> Computer Aided Manufacturing. There was such a large global
> interest in this that groups from many countries were involved
> early in the process (in fact a lot of early MCAD algorithms
> were developed in the Scandinavian countries).
>
> That's the historical background, and STEP was created to
> overcome many of the deficiencies in IGES, but the primary
> purpose remains largely the same: to provide CAM users with
> One True Format to work with and CAD users some hope of
> being able to convey shape information to other CAD users.
> Since the early days STEP has evolved to include electronics
> documentation and testing etc. and for a long time it's had
> the dubious distinction of being the world's most complex
> standard.
>
> Having said all that, no MCAD on the planet uses STEP as its
> native format and I don't even know if STEP can provide that
> feature, so it remains little more than an interchange format.
>
> With the big changes in manufacturing in the 1990s IDF
> attempted to modernize with IDFv4 and failed miserably;
> around the same time the Pro-STEP consortium formed to work
> on an IDF replacement based on STEP. Roughly 20 years later
> the results are mixed and although there has been some level
> of adoption by the likes of Boeing and Airbus (among other
> big players). However, Pro-STEP has always been intended for
> MCAD-ECAD collaboration and not ECAD-ECAD exchange.
>
> I think for ECAD you'll be lucky to get people to agree on
> a format for representing information in schematic symbols,
> PCB footprints, and associated mechanical models; I don't
> believe you'll ever convince commercial operations to agree
> to a universal schematic/artwork definition file since that
> kills their lock-in by severely reducing the cost of changing
> software. I suspect it is possible to develop a common
> symbol/etc format though and convince vendors to adopt it,
> but you need to get the big ECAD vendors on side early on
> and expect this to take a few years. While STEP was created
> to serve manufacturing and demanded by governments as well
> as many corporate users, a common ECAD data exchange format
> would really be mostly useful for vendors to provide users
> with reference models for their ECAD work; you've got to
> ask yourself how a vendor like Altium, Mentor, or Cadence
> will benefit because if there isn't money in it for them
> (save on their own cost or give them a product to sell)
> they won't be interested.

Mouser has their own all-in-one simulator-layout-bom thingy now.  I don't
know about other distributors.  But they do have a incentive to support open
format efforts, and new designs might end up using them.  Too bad the Mouser
one is windows-only.

Britton