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For a successful assembly of a circuit board, the components must be the correct size and shape and placed in the right locations. Not only does this mean that the design of the board must adhere to tolerances governing the creation of the SMT footprints and their placement, but the physical parts must be correct before assembly can even begin. We’re going to look at these SMT component placement tolerances here, and how those tolerances impact the way a PCB is designed.

Working with high power circuits does involve some different PCB design techniques, such as the width and weight of the copper that is used on the board. Let’s take a look here at some of the most important high current PCB design tips that you should know about to avoid any unnecessary drama.

Each circuit board that you see being produced by a PCB contract manufacturer first started its life as a schematic. Someone placed the symbols on the schematic and connected nets to the symbol pins in order to create the design data that would drive the layout of the PCB. Let’s take a closer look at what PCB schematic capture is, and some of the do’s and don’ts that you need to be aware of as you design your printed circuit boards.

The advantage of using the PCB contract manufacturer for the box build is that they are already equipped to handle this level of project management and documentation support. Not only are they used to working with multiple outside resources for parts and materials acquisition, but they also have the engineering and manufacturing staff to handle the mechanical design and build as well. This gives them another advantage over using multiple vendors, which is that all aspects of the box build will be controlled in one location.

Circuit boards can get out of whack too, and when that happens they can bend and twist in ways that are not good for the board. This effect happens when some areas of the board have more copper than others. To prevent this, it is a good idea to even out the amount of copper fill used between the different open areas of the board. Here is some more information on why this problem occurs, and what you should do to ensure that your circuit board has good PCB copper balance.

EMI can be generated in a number of different ways on a PCB, with one of the biggest problems coming from the onboard power supply circuitry. Let’s take a closer look at this problem and some design ideas for reducing EMI in switching power supplies.