PCB Design Flow

The PCB design flow consists of four distinct stages. There is the part research and selection stage, schematic capture and simulation, board layout, and finally board verification.

Figure 2 - The PCB Design Flow

If you are unfamiliar with any of these stages, I recommend that you view the following page, that will be able to provide you additional details on each stage, and how best to handle design: Best Practices in PCB Design.

The remainder of this page will talk about board layout and design. Prior to this layout stage, you must first define a schematic capture (or circuit diagram) in a tool such as NI Multisim. A schematic capture tool allows you to place symbols for electronic components and wire them together. Each of these symbols (for the amplifier, resistor etc…) are linked to a symbol that represents the dimensions and shape of an actual device used on a PCB. So a resistor symbol is associated with a real-world resistor footprint or landpattern. This landpattern is what we use on our board layout in order to define our final PCB.

Figure 3 - Schematic Capture

You must transfer a schematic to a board layout application (such as NI Ultiboard). From here you define the board outline (form factor), place parts onto the board surface (landpattern placement) and route copper connections (make pathways for signals to be conducted through the PCB).

Figure 4 - Board Layout

After these stages, you can export your design to an industry standard format (Gerber) from which a physical board is fabricated. The rest of this page will speak to this physical hardware, and what it consists of.