Electrical Engineering

As we know there exists numerous different kinds of PCB CAD software. The big ones seem to be Eagle, KiCAD, Altium, OrCAD, Solidworks, DesignSpark and probably a few more.

When it comes to mechanical PCB file formats, there is Gerber which seems to be the universal standard. But also .dxf for mechanical drawings/AutoCAD, which is what one often gets from connector component vendors etc.

What I'm wondering is if there exist similar sort of standardized/de facto standard file formats used for schematics and layouts? Is there some universal format supported by several of the big PCB CAD tools, to allow porting between them?

The reason I'm asking is because I'm investigating what PCB CAD we should aim to use whenever dealing with external consultants, who in turn are used to various different tools. If there was a format which could easily be exported/imported by many tools, we would ideally pick that one.

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Standardized schematic/layout file formats for PCB CAD tools?

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