What Is CAM350?
Valor CAM350 is a comprehensive, industry-standard toolset for verifying, optimizing, and exporting printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturing data. Today’s complex PCB designs require thorough verification before they move into production to help ensure successful fabrication and on-time delivery.
For PCB fabricators, identifying design and DFM (Design for Manufacturing) issues during pre-production, before they affect fabrication, is essential. CAM350 provides a complete set of tools to import design data, make corrections when needed, analyze designs for potential manufacturing issues, and generate output data for the factory.
CAM350’s Core Technical Capabilities
- 3D visualization: Examine the finished board from any angle, including the spaces between its layers.
- Automated panelization: Use an automated wizard to create multi-PCB panels and minimize material waste.
- Custom solder paste stencils: Create stencils from Gerber data, PCB footprints, or a stencil library; save and reuse configurations.
- Broad format compatibility: Import ODB++, IPC-2581, Gerber, Excellon, Sieb & Meyer, DXF, GenCAD, and HPGL. CAM350 also supports manufacturing data export in a range of corresponding formats, with additional output options such as PADS ASCII and GenCAD.
- Analysis of critical design issues: Check for acid traps, copper slivers, mask slivers, solder bridging, antennas, pinholes, and thermal relief issues. Advanced checks also cover plated and non-plated holes, blind and buried vias, back drilling, and flex and rigid-flex designs.
- Measurement and reporting tools: Query individual design elements, measure point-to-point distances, and generate Dcode, Bill of Materials (BOM), netlist, and centroid reports.
- Script-based automation: A COM-based API supports recording operations as Visual Basic scripts and developing custom applications with Visual Basic, C, or C++.
CAM350’s Origins: The Founder’s Story
CAM350 did not originate at DownStream Technologies. Joe Clark and his colleagues Rick Almeida and Ken Tepper brought the technology with them when they founded the company on January 1, 2002, shortly after the September 11 attacks and amid the collapse of the dot-com bubble.
We took the CAM350 technology from InnovEDA after the company decided to discontinue the product. We believed that decision was a mistake and that the product still had considerable potential.
Joe Clark, founder of DownStream Technologies
What began as an effort to save a product that might otherwise have been discontinued grew into an industry-standard CAM/DFM tool. DownStream Technologies, together with CAM350, BluePrint-PCB, and DFMStream, became part of Siemens Digital Industries Software when the acquisition closed on April 7, 2025.
What Users Say About CAM350
Source: User reviews on G2.com, a platform for business software reviews.
CAM350 had an average rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars from 43 reviews on G2 when checked in September 2026. The rating and review count may change over time.
The tool is easy to use. Its DRC checks save time, and IPC short-net errors are shown at their exact locations, making shorts in a PCB layout much quicker to investigate.
Verified G2 reviewer, “Good tool to check Gerber for DFM”
G2’s summary of user feedback also highlights CAM350’s approachable interface for both new and experienced engineers, along with its strengths in DFM checks and Gerber file verification. Some users, however, report performance issues when working with large files.
CAM350 in Practice: Phuntronix B.V.
Source: Siemens case study, “Using Valor Process Preparation to achieve NPI efficiency and profitability”.
Phuntronix is a PCB assembly company based in Soesterberg, the Netherlands. It serves customers in the automotive, medical, defense and security, robotics, and consumer electronics sectors. Before digitizing its entire production preparation process, the company used CAM350 in its workflow. According to founder and director Minno de Roo:
At the time, our production process was manual and time-consuming. It involved duplicate data flows because we had to upload the PCB layout to both CAM350 and the machine software.
Minno de Roo, founder and director of Phuntronix B.V.
This detail in Siemens’ case study shows that CAM350 served as a PCB data preparation tool in the real-world workflow of an international PCB assembly company. Phuntronix operates an automated line with a placement capacity of up to 100,000 components per hour. After using CAM350 in its earlier workflow, the company implemented Valor Process Preparation to improve production preparation.
CAM350 Joins the Siemens Portfolio
On April 7, 2025, Siemens completed its acquisition of DownStream Technologies, the company behind CAM350. Founded in 2002 and based in Marlborough, Massachusetts, DownStream expanded Siemens’ PCB solutions portfolio for small and medium-sized businesses and strengthened its coverage of the workflow from design to production preparation.
Bringing DownStream Technologies into Siemens EDA strengthens our manufacturing preparation capabilities and supports a smoother transition from design to production within a scalable, digital electronics design workflow.
Mike Ellow, CEO of Siemens EDA, Siemens Digital Industries Software
We are pleased to join Siemens and bring decades of experience to its ecosystem. Together, we can offer an integrated solution that helps PCB designers hand off their designs to manufacturing more efficiently and with greater confidence.
Rick Almeida, founder of DownStream Technologies
Source: Siemens press release on the acquisition of DownStream Technologies.
Conclusion
From the effort to save a product facing discontinuation in 2002 to its 4.6-out-of-5 user rating and its role in the production workflow of a company such as Phuntronix, CAM350 has demonstrated its value over more than two decades of development. Now part of Siemens Digital Industries Software, it continues to connect engineering design data with the finished physical PCB.
Further Reading:
- Valor Process Engineering Solutions for PCB Manufacturing
- Migrating from Gerber to ODB++ with CAM Compare
- Purchasing CAM350 from an Official Siemens Distributor in Vietnam (Vietnamese)
Contact Vietbay for advice on Valor CAM350:
