Design reviews can easily go off on tangents. Make sure you’re the one sharing your screen.

Every job eventually gets to tape-out day. But before that day comes, a lot of moving parts are wrangled into place. Even the simplest layout will require deliverables for assembly, including custom paste stencil and a bill of materials to associate the correct component for each location on the board. Along the way, a set of physical and electrical properties will be used to gauge line width and length, among other parameters (FIGURE 1). Getting the responsible parties to give guidance on the many assumptions made during layout is the point of the design review.

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DfM means design for money. If it can’t be built, that’s a waste.

Great ideas come together with great timing; what’s left is great execution. Flipping the switch that sets the factory in motion causes a few pain points. These “opportunities for improvement” will dictate your agenda down to the minute with all the little things that go wrong. Let’s say there is a factory downstairs from you. Further, the factory is doing slow and laborious rework on old printed circuit boards, aka PCBs. There is a solution! New PCBs. We’re going from P0 (zero) to P1 (one). That’s where we, the designers, come in.

At new PCB time, the first order of business is improving the electronics in some way. The fix could be better performance, lower cost, higher reliability and, in some cases, all the above. Venturing into wireless technology and gaining FCC approval to play in its allocated spectrum is no slam dunk. Beefing up the power grid is a typical step. A good power distribution network has been known to cover for otherwise iffy routing. Every engineer will have some considerations carried forward.

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