Benchmark

Recently some of our GBR2MIC conversion sofware users were supplied with large Gerber files that required a very long time to convert and rasterize. The CAD processing time for such input files was a serious production bottleneck. The combination of Gerber to MIC and MIC to ST times were adding up to many hours.

After analyzing both the nature of these very large files and the behavior of the MIC to ST Rasterizer we came up with a "compaction" algorithm. This algorithm does additional processing during the conversion but enables the MIC to ST rasterizer to complete its job much faster. The net throughput is greatly increased.

The Hardware

These tests were run using a Sun Blade 1000 workstation equipped with dual 750MHZ UltraSparc CPUs and all data resided on a local disk drive.

The Software

GBR2MIC version 2.07 was used together with the MIC2ST program supplied by Micronic. Both programs run on the Ultra Sparc (Solaris 10)

The Test Files

Three test files are shown below with the following characteristics