Four Steps to Ensure Successful PCB Design
Printed circuit boards (PCBs) are the backbone of electronic products, and the performance, life, and reliability of the end product depend on the electrical systems they form. If designed properly, products with high-quality circuits will have lower field failure and field return rates. As a result, products will be less expensive to produce and more profitable. In order to produce high-quality PCBs on time without increasing design time and incurring costly rework, design and circuit integrity issues must be discovered early in the design process.
In order to bring products to market quickly and reliably, it is necessary to automate the design process using design tools, but how can you ensure the success of your design? What details should you pay attention to in order to maximize design efficiency and product quality? Design tools should obviously be intuitive and powerful enough to overcome complex design challenges, but what else is worth paying attention to? This article lists four steps you can take to ensure successful PCB design.
Step 1—Don’t stop at basic schematic entry
Schematic entry is critical to generating the logical connections of the design, and it must be accurate, easy to use, and integrated with layout to ensure design success.
Simply entering a schematic and transferring it to layout is not enough. To create a high-quality design that meets expectations, you need to ensure that the best components are used and that simulation analysis can be performed to ensure that the design will not have problems when it is delivered for manufacturing.
Step 2 – Don’t Ignore Library Management Library
Management is an important part of the design process. In order to quickly select the best components and place them in the design, it is necessary to easily create and manage the components.
PADS allows you to maintain all design tasks in a library and update the library in real time for ease of use and ensure accuracy in design development. You can access all component information through a single spreadsheet without worrying about data redundancy, multiple libraries, or time-consuming and laborious tool overhead.
Step 3 – Effectively Manage Design Constraints
Today’s critical high-speed designs are extremely complex. Without an effective means to manage constraints, it will be extremely difficult to design, constrain and manage aspects such as routing, topology and signal delays. In order to build a successful product in the first iteration, constraints must be set early in the design process so that the design meets the required goals. Good constraint management prevents you from using expensive or unavailable components and ultimately ensures that the board meets performance and manufacturing requirements.
Step 4 – Make sure you have the layout capabilities you need
PCB layout design has become significantly more complex in recent years. To create smaller, more portable electronic devices, designs have had to become denser. In addition, operating frequencies have increased, requiring designers to evaluate electrical characteristics that may have been overlooked before to ensure that the design is usable. To keep up with the increasing complexity, designers must have a wider range of capabilities to define advanced rule sets, create unique RF shapes, and implement correction structures to improve the overall performance of the design.
During the layout process, intelligent layout tools help create efficient placement and routing strategies. Precision placement reduces violations in the later stages of the design, allowing you to complete projects faster with fewer mistakes.
While manual routing is generally used to achieve true design intent, the effective use of interactive routing in conjunction with automatic routing can help meet market deadlines and improve design quality. Automatic routing can also help with tricky tasks such as differential pair routing, net adjustments, manufacturing optimization, microvias, and build-up techniques. If you plan your routing strategy in advance, you will be much more efficient using automatic routing.
Another challenge is that modern PCBs have thousands of nets to maintain, which can make it difficult to route critical areas of the design. The best way to avoid this problem is to organize the nets into groups so that you can create an effective routing strategy. Once you have created planning groups, you can then label and filter the net groups to highlight the critical nets that need to be routed.
