Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) are backbones of electronic devices and equipment. The increasing density of circuits and decreasing size trend of electronic products lead circuit boards to develop into higher complexity. Holes or vias, responsible for electrical connections between layers and corresponding functions a board will implement according to design requirement, won't effectively work unless they are suitably designed or manufactured. The solution to the other issue, that is, unsuitable design, depends largely on circuit board design engineers who have to create integrated and reliable design files based on which PCB fabricators carry out manufacturing.

It's believed that NC drill file generation has been plaguing most PCB design engineers for a long time. Therefore, it's necessary to summarize design guidelines based on leading PCB design software.

NC drill file, short for numeric control drill file, refers to a type of file regulating all the information concerning hole or via drilling requirement including tooling size, hole size and location.

To create an output package suitable for PCB Manufacturers you can create the files individually so that you have Gerber, NC drill and an IPC netlist or you can create one zipped file (called an ODB++) file which contains all the information required to manufacture a bare printed circuit board. You can also generate an IPC2581 which is a new file format that generates all the data in a single xml file that can be sent to fabricators, assemblers, test houses. This technical note describes how to generate all output files using PCB Editor required for bare board manufacture, either as separate files (RS274X Gerber, NC Drill and an IPC netlist), as one output file (ODB++ format) or using the IPC2581 export.