Valley Services Electronics

Getting a PCB prototyped with speed and precision is an intricate process to manage because the design must also be prepared for eventual long-term production. Balancing the electrical performance and the manufacturability needs of the board requires a lot from both the PCB designer and the manufacturer during the prototype phase. Here are some of the requirements that you should be familiar with so your board can progress successfully through the rapid PCB prototyping phase of its development.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus, the need for rapid medical device product development has been dramatically highlighted. We all marveled at how quickly heavy equipment manufacturers switched production over to building urgently needed medical supplies such as respirators and personal protective equipment. The droves of people who stepped up with home-made protective face masks—often funding a good cause—have been positively inspiring. But for the development of new medical products, this ingenuity needs to be taken to the next level. Medical device innovators need to partner with electronics manufacturers that are equipped to handle these six challenges in the development of their products.

To avoid designing a circuit board that isn’t manufacturable, minimum standards for component spacing must be adhered to in the design layout. Of course, there are many other factors to consider as well, including the electrical and thermal performance of the board, but designing for manufacturability (DFM) is just as important. There are industry standards that offer some assistance with this, however, and here we’ll look at how IPC component spacing guidelines can help as you design.

If PCB edge clearances aren’t respected by their designers, there could be a lot of problems ahead when it comes time to manufacture the board. Let’s take a look at some of the potential problems if PCB component to edge clearances are not observed, and what you as a PCB designer can do to ensure error-free manufacturing.

While we may think in terms of an individual printed circuit board when designing them, the reality is that circuit boards are often laid out in a panel to help lower production costs. Let’s take a look at what a PCB panel is, and then the eight PCB panelization guidelines that you should know for circuit board design.

In the first three parts of this series we have looked at the schematic capture process, placing components in the physical layout of the board, and finally routing the net connections of the layout. Now it is time to get the board ready to be manufactured, but before we do that there is one critical step that has to be done; running the design rule checks.