Communicating is hard. It took thousands of years just for man to develop a common language. I don’t suppose, then, even in our “enlightened” state, we should expect it to be easy to develop a common, complete method for describing all the myriad features of a printed circuit board.

This week at PCB West, the Silicon Valley annual trade show, a special panel will convene to address just that decades-old issue. (Disclosure: I’m the moderator.) I don’t expect the group to solve all the industry’s data problems in just 90 minutes, but I do think a few key aspects will be noted.

Here’s a question I plan to raise: Would the problem of unintelligent data files be essentially resolved if the initial cost to upgrade were lower?

Upstream, Intel, for example, sends an army of engineers to its suppliers to help them implement new processes. Few companies have the resources of Intel, of course. No fabricator does. And this leaves the fabs in a bind: They know that Gerber is insufficient, and spend countless hours massaging (often without their customer’s knowledge) the bad or incomplete data received from design. But with tooling jobs stacking up on their desks, and margins cut to the bone, they claim no resources to spend on implementing one of the richer data transfer formats like ODB++ or IPC-2581.

So who pays?

Neither IPC nor Valor make any money directly from their respective data transfer formats, so it’s unlikely either would see the value in extending themselves further by underwriting the onsite development and implementation work. (Whether they should anyway is a column for another day.) Designers tend to be risk-averse: They are unlikely to risk their jobs on something upper management is not mandating. Thus, it may be that the fabricators need to start assigning a CAM engineer to its key customers — perhaps one at a time, to keep costs down — to help them get up and running — no matter which rich format they choose.

The argument for switching to a superior format(s) is that manufacturers will save money down the road. I understand, however, that quantifying the cost savings is exceedingly difficult. Moreover, as one CAD developer told me, there’s an unwritten incentive for the status quo (read: Gerber) because manufacturers don’t want to appear inflexible.

I would argue that the industry’s margins can’t afford to keep sending bad data downstream and hoping for a miracle in return. Fabricators over the past decade have lost most of their influence over the printed circuit board development. This is an area where they can truly coach their customers — and add value in the process. They should grab it.