Printed Circuit Board Components Suggested Locations — Thermals

Pouya Asrar
2 min readDec 18, 2023

The complexity of PCB layout has increased over the years due to the evolution of the functional requirements as well as the increase in the number of electronic dies on the board. It is crucial to design circuits with high levels of precision in order to take into account EMI, signal integrity, and thermal concerns.

As a first step in ensuring that a PCB layout contains all of the required components and performs flawlessly, it is important to ensure that the component placement on the PCB layout is perfect.

Photo by Ludovico Ceroseis on Unsplash

Circuit designers play a very important role in deciding where the components should be placed on the board so that the performance is balanced, and to ensure that the placements comply with electrical, mechanical, and thermal requirements of the board. The placement of all these parts should be such that the board can still be tested after all these placements have been made. As far as the components are concerned, their pins are generally better positioned so that they can be adjacent to the neighboring component’s pins, which then puts the designer in a difficult position of having to decide what is the best solution for all of them together in order to provide the best and most alleged overall circuit performance with minor adverse effects.

There is a need for the designer to be responsible for the floor planning of the layout at the very beginning. It is of utmost importance that the exact locations of the RF, analog, and power spots be determined before moving the components around. By doing so, the noise from one area would be less likely to affect the noise from another area. Then, it would be a good idea to start placing the components on the board by installing the connectors in their positions.

Thank you for reading. Staying tuned for the next article published by Pouya Asrar!

--

--