There are two cases where the words annotation and back-annotation will come up in the context of PCB design. One has to do with the general EDA (electronic design automation) workflow: you’re moving from schematic to PCB layout and back again multiple times, and simply need to ensure that all the reference designators are still relevant. The other is a bit more technical and has to do with electronic simulation. There’s a concept called propagation delay. Regardless of which brought you to this post, we’ll cover everything you need to know about annotation and back annotation in PCB design.

What do we mean by annotation and back-annotation in PCB design?

Let’s…

The PCB Designer position is a hub where a lot of abstract and concrete information is funneled into a physical product. The boards start with the inspiration of an inventor. The idea is fleshed out in terms of the mechanical and the electrical requirements. Those two teams speak their own languages with just a little overlap.

The signal integrity and power integrity experts add their own flavor. The signal integrity people “speak” primarily in S-parameters shown on charts that are “off the charts”. Their counterparts in the power integrity domain bring us tables of data augmented with power trees that…

Circuits are usually developed with a few unknowns at the start. Future price and availability of key components is a typical day-one risk. The wise designer leaves themselves some room to future-proof their prototype against the supply chain uncertainty. At the printed circuit board level, risk management generally entails creating separate paths on the P0 (non-form-factor) engineering builds. One path will assess a particular approach and another will facilitate a different answer to the same signal(s).

Zero Ohm Jumpers

A zero ohm resistor is used where the path diverges. While there would only be one resistor, it would have two possible placement options…

Image Credit: Author — starting small

As PCB Designers, we are often tasked with filling out a board with geometry that repeats itself. Better physical resemblance usually equals better performance. For instance, Ethernet ports will have a transformer right after the connector. They will generally work the same if they look the same. And life will be much easier if you were not reinventing every instance of a circuit. Let’s walk through the process.

Some form of the Copy and Paste commands are always included with our tools. The tools themselves are referred to as PCB editors. The parts we…

It’s hard to imagine PCB design without the convenience of EDA (electronic design automation) software:

• Schematic capture editors allow you to build circuits on-the-fly by linking component symbols together into a schematic diagram.
• Netlists can be automatically generated into a variety of file formats with the click of a button.
• Schematic diagrams integrate seamlessly with 3D CAD models.
• Design rule checks (DRC) can be run to verify that physical and electrical connections are correct.
• Generate smart PDFs, bill of materials, manufacturing files, and more.

But we’ve only scratched the surface of what EDA software can do. In this post, we’re…

So you’ve created a PCB schematic using OrCAD Capture, and you’re ready to take your design to the next step in the electronic design automation (EDA) process with a PCB layout tool. How would you do it?

Well if you’re like most PCB designers, chances are high you looked up a quick 2-minute tutorial video, generated the requisite “netlist” and integrated it into your chosen PCB layout tool, and moved straight to designing.

But if you’re curious as to what exactly a netlist is, and what’s going on behind the scenes when you create that intermediary file, this post is…

Schematic capture is the first step of the EDA (electronic design automation) cycle. It involves using a schematic editor to sketch a circuit diagram which maps all the connections between the various components that make up your circuit.

As you might imagine, the larger and more complex the circuit, the harder it is to properly lay out all the components and connections for your design on a single page. …

How and When to Use an Engineering Change Order to Revise a Document

Image credit: Bureau of Labor Statistics

The tag-line for a big box hardware store comes to mind: “Never Stop Improving”. We can say that about almost any industry and certainly any high tech electronics company that employs printed circuit board designers. Since words have connotations, I refer to “changes” as “improvements”. New and improved has better optics than new and different.

It all starts with rev 1 for prototypes and rev A for release to production. In any case, we release the most elegant design possible in the limited time we have to hit a market window. That window could…