5 things to avoid when Designing PCB

While trying to prototype a PCB design, you will experience some common slip-ups and even you will experience some these repetitively. It is smarter to think about these slip-ups and complete the PCB fabrication process blunder free to spare time and endeavor in revising.

 

1. Forget to Add Board Outline

Although it is kind of a trivial aspect, adding a board outline is an important thing you have to do, even at the beginning of your designing process. A board outline is kind of a guideline for the PCB manufacturers to do board cutting. Moreover, by adjusting the board outline you can change your PCB shape as desired based on your needs, or even just to make it looks fancier.

 

2. The laying patterns are Incorrect

Although most of PCB design software makes basic tasks become easier, some designers probably want to tweak some experimental settings with let’s say components selection or maybe laying patterns. Then it is suggested to draw the schematic diagram manually first. And since a manual laid landing pattern is prone to some errors, one of a simple error is in pad-to-pad spacing. It is a problem since if it is too small then the soldering procedure leads to harder to handle hence making the PCB prototyping process more complex.

 

3. The High-speed Traces are Too Long

In the case that the signals require so fast-moving, you have to lay short and straight traces. Otherwise, you will possibly fail to attain very high-speed signals as a consequence of lengthy traces.

4. Using hidden or blind vias whilst designing PCB

Utilizing hidden or blind vias lead to lots of pains whilst prototyping PCB design. The blind vias connect external layers and the internal layers whilst hidden vias are within the two internal layers. Unfortunately, this stack-up could interfere with the vias functionality. Because of this, many designer experts recommend only use through vias when designing PCBs.

 

5.Wrong placement/Ignoring of Decoupling capacitors

Putting decoupling capacitors is quite important to the appropriate PCB functionality. It is better to put decoupling capacitors near to the pins that need a stable/constant voltage supply to run. Moreover, please consider using capacitors together with a series of inductors to make an LC LPF (low-pass filter) that reduces noise in a highly sensitive device.


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