The classification of Copying Printed Circuit Board for purely manufacturing purposes, this kind of copying behavior stems from some PCB Board manufacturers that do not have enough capacity for Research and development or PCB design. Their goal is to pursue direct economic benefits.
First of all, after clarifying the functions of the PCBs that they need to reproduce, they searched same or similar pcb boards with same or similar functions in the market, and obtained the technical information of these pcb boards including the layout design, gerber file, bill of material and schematic diagram through circuit board reverse engineering. Directly based on these layout design guides the production of related PCB boards, even in the production process of PCB boards, the layout design of others is applied to their own pcb boards. This simple printed circuit board copying is indeed exist in the industry. It’s not uncommon, because in the current situation of electronic products in the cottage, counterfeit pcb board has its market space.
Secondly is partial use of original design from Copying Printed Circuit Board:
The genius of this kind of copying behavior lies in its concealment. It is different from the complete circuit board copying of the first behavior. This kind of PCB copying behavior is based on the original pcb layout design, extracting the technical information such as partial schematic diagram with specific functions in the original PCB design, and then adding some conventional designs to achieve some auxiliary functions, and then form a new pcb board layout design, which formally avoids the pcb reverse engineering intellectual property risk caused by full replication for direct production, but ultimately In the end, this kind of pcb reverse engineering behavior is not advisable, we will talk about its intellectual property issues later.
