The next portion of design documentation revolves around how you define your release package. The importance here is to thoroughly capture all of the needed information to have your design produced organized in a logical and sane manner. Here the lowest level folder are your fabrication files. These are the collection of mechanical files and documentation that details the PCB. These are your gerber files and any fab notes that detail your layer-stack, materials, colors, etc.
Above this we have our Artwork folder. This would house the fabrication files along with the needed assembly files. These would be the pick-and-place data and a 3D model of the design. A detailed 3D model can be exceptionally useful to remove doubt on connector orientation and component polarity. These models would be backed up with silkscreen markings where possible but it’s a useful addition to our documentation. Finally, we have the quote package that ties it all together along with the Bill Of Materials.
I want to be sure to call-out the file-name scheme. It’s paramount to be sure that designs are properly serialized by some sort of product number and revision. A lot of the time designs can have similar purposes and can have almost the same description or we have a compatibility breaking change that would necessitate a serial number change. Anything to plainly remove any form of ambiguity or doubt on what the design is.
Figure 1: Release Package Format