The most common boardview extension. Several unrelated formats share it, which is why one viewer opens a .brd and another refuses it.

What is a .brd file?

In repair circles a .brd is usually the plain-text "Test_Link" style boardview (it starts with a str_length: header) or its obfuscated variant used for Apple logic boards. These open directly in OpenBoardView and FlexBV.

A .brd can also be a native Cadence Allegro PCB database. Those are binary, much larger (tens of megabytes) and need the Cadence Allegro Free Physical Viewer, or a conversion, to be read.

If a viewer reports an unknown format, check the file size and the first bytes in a text editor: readable text means a repair boardview, binary garbage means an Allegro database.

How to open a .brd file

  • OpenBoardView
  • FlexBV
  • BoardViewer
  • Allegro Free Physical Viewer (Allegro .brd only)

Apple 820-xxxxx boardviews are almost always .brd and open in OpenBoardView without any setup.

Recommended software

Brand
Apple 416 ASUS 214 HP 114 Lenovo 89 Acer 84 Dell 73 MSI 48 Toshiba 22 Sony 21 ECS 4 Fujitsu 2 Samsung 1 LG 1 Gigabyte 1 Clevo 1
Device
Laptop 2,112 Mac 401 Desktop 50 Phone 2
2,565 files

Related formats

.bdv BDV boardview (Honhan).fz FZ boardview (ASUS / Pegatron).cad CAD boardview (GenCAD).tvw TVW boardview (Tebo-ICT).asc ASC boardview (ASUS TSICT).bvr BVR boardview (BoardView R).bv BV boardview (ATE).pcb PCB boardview (XZZ and others).cst CST boardview (IBM / Lenovo Castw).f2b F2B boardview (Unisoft ProntoPLACE)