How do you train and mentor new or junior circuit designers on circuit documentation and standards?

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Circuit documentation and standards are essential for any electronic circuit design project, as they ensure clarity, consistency, and quality of the design and its implementation. However, training and mentoring new or junior circuit designers on these aspects can be challenging, as they may lack the experience, knowledge, or skills to follow them properly. In this article, you will learn some tips and best practices on how to train and mentor new or junior circuit designers on circuit documentation and standards, based on the following sections:

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Siddharth Tallur

Sensor systems product innovator || In-charge of Wadhwani Electronics Lab (WEL) @ IIT Bombay || Views personal
James Beams

Senior Hardware Development Engineer at Apple

1 Why document and standardize?

Explaining the importance of circuit documentation and standards is the first step in training and mentoring new or junior circuit designers. Emphasize that circuit documentation and standards help to communicate design intent, specifications, and requirements to other designers, engineers, manufacturers, and customers. This also facilitates the review, testing, debugging, and verification of the design and its functionality. Additionally, it enables the reuse, modification, and improvement of the design for future projects or applications. Moreover, it ensures compliance with industry, regulatory, and customer expectations and norms.

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James Beams

Senior Hardware Development Engineer at Apple
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It can take a lot of time to derive optimal circuit designs, and without documentation it might not be clear to others how you arrived at your optimal design. Someone else that then has to later understand your design will have to re-create all that effort, which can waste significant time.

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2 What to document and standardize?

The next step is to teach new or junior circuit designers the elements of design that need to be documented and standardized, and how to do it effectively and efficiently. This should include circuit diagrams, schematics, layout, bill of materials (BOM), and testing and verification. The diagrams should involve symbols, labels, annotations, colors, and formats to represent the components, connections, and functions of the circuit. To design and optimize the physical arrangement of components and traces on the board, software tools, libraries, templates, and formats should be used. Additionally, creating and updating a list of components with their quantities, specifications, and sources is essential for circuit design and fabrication. Lastly, documenting the methods, procedures, results, and feedback of the circuit testing and verification process is necessary.

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James Beams

Senior Hardware Development Engineer at Apple
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It is useful to include pages in your schematic that have documentation items such as block diagrams. For revisions it's great to document what changes were made and why. For hard-strapped components it is useful to document on the page what the strap settings are configured for. For power supplies it's useful to include key specs directly in the schematic. If there's additional documentation, derivations, bugfixes, etc. used to build the schematic then it should be documented in whatever system is used to document these items for your company, and links included in the schematic to refer to these documents.

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3 How to follow and apply standards?

The third step is to demonstrate to new or junior circuit designers how to follow and apply the relevant standards for circuit documentation and design, depending on the project scope, context, and requirements. Introduce them to industry standards developed and published by professional associations, organizations, or bodies that regulate or guide the electronic circuit design industry (e.g. IEEE, ANSI, IEC, IPC). Additionally, explain how to access and use regulatory standards imposed by governmental or legal authorities that govern or oversee the electronic circuit design sector (e.g. FCC, CE, UL, RoHS). Finally, provide guidance on how to access and use customer standards specified by the customer or client that commissions or requests the electronic circuit design project (e.g. their own guidelines, preferences, or expectations).

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4 How to document and standardize collaboratively?

The fourth step is to train new or junior circuit designers on how to document and standardize their designs collaboratively, as they will likely work in teams or with other stakeholders. Teach them to use collaborative software tools, platforms, or systems that allow them to share, edit, comment, and track their circuit documentation and design files with other team members or collaborators, such as Google Docs, GitHub, Altium Designer. They should also follow a common naming convention, version control, and file management system that ensures consistency, accuracy, and traceability of their circuit documentation and design files. Additionally, it is important to adopt a clear and respectful communication style, feedback mechanism, and conflict resolution strategy that fosters trust, cooperation, and learning among their team members or collaborators.

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5 How to document and standardize continuously?

The fifth step is to mentor new or junior circuit designers on how to document and standardize their designs continuously, as they will need to update, improve, or modify their designs throughout the project lifecycle or beyond. You should advise them to review their circuit documentation and design files regularly and systematically, checking for errors, inconsistencies, gaps, or redundancies and correcting or improving them as needed. Additionally, they should test and verify their circuit documentation and design files periodically and rigorously, utilizing various methods, tools, or scenarios and validating or refining them as required. Finally, they should incorporate feedback from their team members, collaborators, customers, or users into their circuit documentation and design files, making changes or enhancements as appropriate.

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Siddharth Tallur

Sensor systems product innovator || In-charge of Wadhwani Electronics Lab (WEL) @ IIT Bombay || Views personal
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This is an often overlooked aspect, and an important habit to develop for any young and relatively inexperienced project team. Document on the fly, maintaining daily logs and a scrapbook of plans, activities, successes and failures, discussion notes etc. Develop and follow standard templates for each activity (e.g. circuit design document, test report, meeting minutes, root cause analysis exercise, project progress tracker etc.) For each document, clearly identify authors, reviewers, metrics for measuring completion of document, and deadlines. Each individual in the team should have their daily agenda for documentation clearly defined and communicated across the team.

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6 How to document and standardize creatively?

The sixth step is to offer new or junior circuit designers creative guidance on how to document and standardize their designs. Encourage them to experiment with different styles, formats, or techniques of circuit documentation and design, exploring new possibilities or solutions. They should also customize their files according to their own preferences, goals, or interests, adding their own flair, signature, or touch. Finally, they should showcase their files to their peers, mentors, customers, or audiences in order to demonstrate their skills, achievements, or value.

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Siddharth Tallur

Sensor systems product innovator || In-charge of Wadhwani Electronics Lab (WEL) @ IIT Bombay || Views personal
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New team members bring in new ideas. A project lead should be open to new ideas, and consult team members on better ways of documenting work, new software or tools that may make the job easier or more effective, seamless ways of sharing and reviewing documents etc. While documents have to be updated daily, and may not always be formatted or organized appropriately for external sharing, it is important to periodically generate reports, slides or other collateral that may be useful for external sharing with customers/clients/sponsors or other stakeholders. Involving younger team members in this process may help in motivating them to view documentation as an impactful activity, and not a necessary evil.

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7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?

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Siddharth Tallur

Sensor systems product innovator || In-charge of Wadhwani Electronics Lab (WEL) @ IIT Bombay || Views personal
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It is important to also create impactful illustrations for effective communication of the work. Consider hiring a professional designer/illustrator if you can afford to recruit one, to help with periodically creating and polishing infographics, posters, graphical abstracts, etc.

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How do you train and mentor new or junior circuit designers on circuit documentation and standards?

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1 Why document and standardize?

2 What to document and standardize?

3 How to follow and apply standards?

4 How to document and standardize collaboratively?

5 How to document and standardize continuously?

6 How to document and standardize creatively?

7 Here’s what else to consider

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