PCB Design Best Practices Pillar 1: Digitally Integrated and Optimized

Welcome back to the PCB Design Best Practices newsletter!

As I outlined in the first edition, there are five pillars of PCB design best practices. The first one I am going to focus on is “Digitally integrated and optimized.” Let's take a look at what a digitally integrated and optimized electronic systems design flow looks like.

This environment enables efficient, secure, concurrent design across all engineering teams (IC, IC packaging, FPGA and PCB within electronics, as well as mechanical and software), enabling teams to optimize the costs associated with a project, accelerate design time, manage data integrity, and improve the quality of results.

Ultimately, it helps companies get to market faster with better products by increasing productivity, accelerating collaboration, and improving visibility across different teams. Being digitally integrated and optimized also supports early visibility on control of cost, resources, and schedules, and helps manage risk.

Within this first pillar there are three PCB design best practices to highlight:

Electro-mechanical co-design

The first best practice within this pillar that I want to start off with is the electro-mechanical (ECAD/MCAD) co-design. When we talk about best practices, the format that’s the latest and greatest right now is the IDX format for the ECAD/MCAD collaboration. We should look for a methodology that enables context-based, integral collaboration between the domains and the disciplines. The value you’re going to get from that is that you have streamlined, integrated collaboration that minimizes the risk of errors during the data exchange.

Design and manufacturing collaboration

Another best practice is the collaboration between design and manufacturing and how those two disciplines are exchanging data. It should be bidirectional. By doing this, we enable lessons learned from manufacturing to be fed back into design. That bidirectional loop, or that data exchange, influences the design. To do this, we utilize intelligent data formats such as ODB++ and IPC-2581. These types of data formats enable intelligent communication from engineering to manufacturing. The value we gain is an optimized, integrated collaboration that minimizes errors during the data exchange, and it provides a continuous feedback loop of lessons learned back to design engineering.

Library and data management

Another best practice of this pillar is library and data management. And what I mean by that is, how are you controlling your data, whether it’s your library data or your actual IP??You want to establish an internal set of guidelines and rules on how you’re going to do things. That way you’re consistent from project to project, and it gives you a way to look back to see how you can optimize and be better as time goes on. Think about industry standards that are already established: how are you absorbing them or using them? Nowadays, we work globally, and you may not speak the same language as an engineer in another country, but the common language can be an industry standard.

A digitally integrated and optimized environment is essential

In conclusion, a digitally integrated and optimized multidomain environment can enable secure, efficient, and concurrent designs across all engineering teams, but you must take a look at best practices when it comes to electro-mechanical co-design, design/manufacturing, and library and data management.

As we continue along in this series I will zero in on each best practice within this pillar and provide examples of how to implement, address challenges and overcome roadblocks.

Thanks for following along, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube playlist for this series. If you're looking for more information like this, you may enjoy my blog posts on electronic systems design.