The printed circuit board (PCB) is the body of an electronic product, and the performance, life, and reliability of the final product depend on the electrical system it constitutes. If properly designed, products with high-quality circuitry will have a lower rate of field failures and field returns. Therefore, the production cost of the product will be lower and the profit will be higher. In order to produce high-quality PCB boards on time without adding design time and costly rework, design and circuit integrity issues must be caught early in the design process.
In order to bring products to market quickly and reliably, it is necessary to use design tools to automate the design process, but how to ensure the success of the design? What details should be paid attention to in order to maximize design efficiency and product quality? Design tools should obviously be intuitive to use and powerful enough to overcome complex design challenges, but what else is worth noting? This article outlines eight steps you can take to ensure a successful PCB design.
Step One—Don't Stop at Basic Schematic Entry
Schematic entry is critical to generating the logical connections of your design. It must be accurate, easy to use, and integrated with layout to ensure a successful design.
Simply entering a schematic and transferring it to layout is not enough. In order to create a high-quality design that meets expectations, it is necessary to ensure that the best components are used, and simulation analysis can be performed to ensure that the design will not fail when it is delivered to manufacturing.
Step Two—Don't Ignore Library Management Library
management is an important part of the design process. To quickly select the best components and place them in a design, easy creation and easy management of devices is necessary.
PADS allows you to maintain all your design tasks in one library that can be updated in real time for ease of use and precision in design development. You can access all component information from a single spreadsheet without worrying about data redundancy, multiple libraries, or time-consuming tool overhead.
Step Three—Effectively Manage Design Constraints
Today's critical high-speed designs are extremely complex, and without an effective means to manage constraints, designing, constraining, and managing routing, topology, and signal delays becomes extremely difficult . 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 rule management prevents you from using expensive or unavailable components and ultimately ensures that the board meets performance and manufacturing requirements.
Step Four—Ensure You Have the Layout Capabilities You Need
In recent years, PCB layout design has become significantly more complex than it used to be. To create smaller, more portable electronic devices, the density of designs has to increase. In addition, the frequency of operation has also been increased, which requires designers to evaluate electrical characteristics that may have been ignored before to ensure that the design will work. To keep pace with increasing complexity, designers must have broader capabilities to define advanced rule sets, create unique RF shapes and implement correction structures to improve the overall performance of a design.
During placement, intelligent placement tools help create efficient placement and routing strategies. Precision placement reduces late-stage violations, allowing you to complete projects faster and with fewer mistakes.
While manual routing is typically used to achieve true design intent, the effective use of interactive routing with automatic routing can help meet market timelines and improve design quality. Autorouting also helps with tricky tasks such as differential pair routing, net tuning, manufacturing optimization, micro vias and build-up techniques. If the routing strategy is planned in advance, the efficiency of using automatic routing will be greatly improved.
Another challenge is that modern PCBs maintain thousands of nets, which can make routing difficult in critical areas of the design. The best way to avoid this problem is to group net lines into groups so that an efficient routing strategy can be created. Once planning groups have been created, net groups can be tagged and filtered to highlight critical nets that require routing.