PCB designing industrial training and it’s benefits

All around us are electronic devices. Some are these devices are subtle, while others attract a lot of attention. But whether the device is something that silently monitors your health, or is the smartphone that annoys you with constant interruptions, they all will have some sort of printed circuit board at their core. Ogma Techlab has the most advance tools and experienced professionals to guide you all in your journey of PCB learning.ogma will teach it’s students PCB design in the simplest way that is possible, so let us first study what is PCB design and what does it deals with?

What is a Printed Circuit Board?
A printed circuit board is a rigid structure that contains electrical circuitry made up of embedded metal wires called traces, and larger areas of metal called planes. Electronic components are soldered to the top, bottom, or both layers of the board onto metal pads. These pads are connected to the board circuitry allowing the components to be interconnected together. The board may be composed of either a single layer of circuitry, circuitry on the top and bottom, or of multiple layers of circuitry stacked together.

Circuit boards are built with a dielectric core material with poor electrical conducting properties to make the circuitry transmission as pure as possible, and then interspaced with additional layers of metal and dielectric as needed. The standard dielectric material used for circuit boards is a flame-resistant composite of woven fiberglass cloth and epoxy resin known as FR-4, while the metal traces and planes for the circuitry are usually composed of copper.

Printed circuit boards are used for a variety of purposes. You can find simple circuit boards in toys or controllers, while advanced circuit boards are used in computers and telecommunications.

Some boards are made with flexible materials thereby allowing them to be used in unique cases and enclosures that require them to bend around other features of the device. Some boards are built with specialized materials due to the high frequencies that they operate at, while other boards have heavy layers of copper in them for high powered circuits used in industrial control panels and other similar applications.

There are boards designed for extreme environments such as underground sensors or the engine compartment of your car. Specialized circuit boards are used for aviation, space, and military applications that impose strict tolerances on their manufacturing and performance.

Although there are many different applications for printed circuit boards, they are usually designed following a common process. This is what we will examine next.

The Process of Printed Circuit Board Design
To build the physical circuit board you must first design it, which is accomplished using PCB design CAD tools. PCB design is broken into two main categories: schematic capture to create the circuitry connectivity in a diagram, and then PCB layout to design the actual physical circuit board.

The first step is to develop the library CAD parts that you will need for the design. This will include schematic symbols, simulation models, footprints for PCB layout, and step models for 3D printed circuit board display. Once the libraries are ready the next step is to create the logical representation of the circuitry on a schematic. CAD tools are used to place the symbols on a schematic sheet, and then connect them to form the circuitry.

At the same time, circuit simulation is run to verify that the design will work electrically the way it is intended to. Once these tasks are completed, the schematic tools will send their connectivity data over to the layout tools.

On the layout side of PCB design, the schematic connectivity is received and processed as nets that connect two or more component pins. With an outline of the intended board shape on the screen, the layout designer will place the component footprints into their correct locations. Once these components are optimally organized, the next step is to connect the nets to the pins by drawing the traces and planes between the pins. The CAD tools will have design rules built into them that prevent the traces of one net from touching another net, as well as governing many other widths and spaces needed for a complete design. Once the routing is complete, the design tools are used again to create manufacturing drawings and the output files that the manufacturer will use to build the board.

The design and manufacturing of a circuit board is a step by step process: schematic creation and simulation, setting up PCB design grids and DRCs, component placement, PCB routing, power planes, and finally assembling the BOM and building the board. Next, we will look more in-depth at these steps.

How to Make a Printed Circuit Board Step by Step
Although the design and manufacturing of a printed circuit board assembly can be generalized as schematic capture, PCB layout, and circuit board fabrication and assembly, the details of each step are very involved. We’ll take a look here at some of the more specific aspects of each of these steps.

Schematic Creation Using Schematic Diagram Symbols to Identify Electronic Components
Before you can start the design of the board within the CAD tools, you have to make sure that you have the library parts to work with first. For the schematic, this means creating logic symbols for the parts that you will be working with; resistors, capacitors, inductors, connectors, and integrated circuits (IC’s). With these parts ready for use, you can then begin to organize them on the schematic sheets within the CAD tools. Once the parts are roughly placed, you can then draw in the lines of connectivity between the pins of the schematic symbols. These lines are known as nets and they can represent single nets or groups of nets for memory or data circuits. During the schematic capture process, you can move the parts and nets as needed to optimally create the circuitry that is required.

Please look here for more information on the schematic capture process.
Using SPICE with Demo Circuits and Netlists to Simulate the Circuitry With the parts and nets organized on the schematic, the next step is to verify that the circuit as drawn will work the way you intend for it too. To verify this you will simulate the circuits in a Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis tool otherwise known as SPICE. These tools allow PCB engineers to test the circuits that they are designing before building the actual hardware. As such, they can save time and money making these tools an essential part of the PCB design process.

Read this to find out more about analyzing a design using SPICE.
PCB Design Grids, DRCs for Routing Verification Procedures, and Other CAD Tool Setups The design tools that PCB designers use have many different capabilities. Among those are the ability to set up design rules and constraints that will keep you from touching nets that shouldn’t be connected, and maintaining the correct amount of distance to different objects. You also have many other aids available to you such as design grids that can help you to place components and route traces in a neat and orderly manner.

To find out more about setting up a PCB design database, you can read about design rules and setting up design grids.

Precise Component Placement Layout for Maximum Performance
With your design database set up correctly, and the network connectivity information has been imported from the schematic, you are ready to start the physical layout of the circuit board. The first step here is to place the component footprints within the board outline in the CAD system. Each footprint will have the net connections displayed as a “rubber-band” image to show you which parts that they connect to. You will want to place these parts for their best performance being mindful of what they connect to, areas of excessive heat and electrical noise, and other physical obstructions such as connectors, cables, and mounting hardware. You also need to place the components so that they can be best assembled by the manufacturer.

Please look here to learn more about printed circuit board layout component placement With the components placed (although they can be moved as needed), it is time to connect the nets. This is done by converting the rubber-band net connections into drawn traces and planes. Your CAD tools will have many features that will enable you to do this including some automated routing features that can save you a lot of time. Great care must be taken however when routing to make sure that the nets are the correct length for the signals they are conducting, as well as making sure that they do not cross areas of excessive noise. This can result in cross-talk or other signal integrity problems that may degrade the performance of the built board, so to know more about PCB design join us at Ogma Techlab and become a true professional in this field of PCB design.