

The Design ProcessĪ Printed Circuit Board or PCB is thing which holds your entire project hardware together! It links and connects various electronic components together on a common physical platform. We can now design and fabricate our own PCBs at home. The work which used to take hours previously can now be done in seconds! This has also brought the PCB design process to hobbyists which was earlier limited to professionals. Rejoice! These CAD software have simplified the design process beyond any imaginable level. With the advent of CAD software for PCB designing, those days are gone. And if an error occurred, it used to take forever to debug. These methods needed a lot of patience and time. They also used techniques such as wire-wrap and point to point method for production.

In early days, before the PCB CAD systems even existed, the designers had to manually layout pads, tracks, etc. To become an expert in PCB design, it takes a great deal of talent and knowledge to place components as close as possible without compromising the performance of the circuit. We can only teach the basics, but the technique will mature once you start working on more and more projects. And this is why many companies hire PCB experts! You can find PCBs everywhere, all around you – inside computers, phones, power supply, watches, thermostats, cameras, automobiles, traffic lights, microwave oven, refrigerator – and they are increasing – which means PCB designers are in demand now, and will remain so for a while!Īs a matter of fact, PCB designing is a creative and individual learning process. While it may come naturally to some, it can be daunting even for experienced circuit designers. Your circuit may work as a prototype on a breadboard, but it might not work on a PCB. There are many types of circuits that you can design on a PCB – like analog, digital, RF – and the PCB layout may make-or-break the performance and working of the circuit. Let’s design the same on a PCB. This article and a couple more of them will be addressing the topic of PCB designing.

Now it’s time to step up to the next level. If you are an electronics hobbyist you might have probably designed many electronic circuits and even prototyped them on a breadboard. PCB of NI myRIO (Source: National Instruments) Introduction to PCB Design
