In my previous blog, I introduced the five pillars of PCB design best practices. In this blog, I’ll focus on the second pillar, “engineering productivity and efficiency.” By optimizing engineering productivity and efficiency, you can reduce design cycle time, costs, and risks.
While PCB design may be similar regardless of the company or team you work for, execution is what sets different companies apart. Engineering productivity and efficiency enables you to manage complex, high-capacity designs predictably and reliably. It helps you accelerate routine tasks using advanced, interactive automated design support, and it assists in implementing constraint-driven processes to design correct by construction. Furthermore, it facilitates concurrent team design to reduce design cycle time.
Here are several PCB design best practices that fall within the engineering productivity and efficiency pillar:
Design Automation: Utilize a combination of interactive and automated routing strategies to assign parts to groups or clusters. Generate manufacturing outputs using built-in automation functionality. Design automation shortens design cycle times, increases layout efficiency, and ensures consistent manufacturing outputs.
Concurrent Design: Collaborate on the schematic and layout phases of the design using advanced capabilities. Have multiple Electrical Engineers (EEs) and PCB designers working in the schematic and layout phases, respectively, simultaneously. Concurrent design reduces project time and optimizes multidiscipline integration.
Design Reuse: Utilize existing, known good circuitry and proven layouts that have been tested and validated to avoid reinventing the wheel with each design. Manage the reuse modules no differently than a single component in your library. Share hardware IP globally to design whole systems faster and reduce design cycle time, costs, and risk.
Constraint-Driven Design: Automate design constraints management to control your electrical and/or physical rules and HW requirements. Design quality into your board by having confidence that you’re meeting your requirements as you’re designing the board, in real-time. Constraint-driven design eliminates the human factor of having to manually check and validate the design after the fact.
Advanced Design: Use the opportunity for rigid-flex methodology within our tool sets to define a board outline, PCB stackups, and regional constraints more efficiently. Rigid-flex design eliminates connectors, which helps optimize signal flow from board to board. High pin count BGAs and other high pin count components require the implementation of High-Density Interconnect (HDI) approach to design specific components, potentially reducing costs.
By utilizing today’s tools, horsepower, and capabilities regarding engineering productivity and efficiency, we can significantly optimize the design approach to produce higher quality designs, be more efficient, and have the best potential to lower project risks. In subsequent blogs, I’ll delve into each best practice within this pillar, provide examples of how to implement them, and address challenges and overcome roadblocks.