CAD/CAM for PCB Manufacturing

To date, computer-aided manufacturing for printed circuit boards (CAM for PCBs) has primarily meant numerically controlled drilling and component insertion. Numerical control is a technique where a computer-based controller reads a program, which is a sequential list of detailed codes, and translates the individual steps in the program into commands for a machine tool. When a PCB is designed on a computer-aided design system (CAD) a database exists which is a description of the board. CAD/CAM is having a computer extract information from the CAD database and generate the NC program.