As PCB designs grow more complex, partitioning and teamwork become part of the layout strategy.

Printed circuit board design grows in complexity with each passing year. Many protocols must be implemented. An ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) or an FPGA (field-programmable gate array) may be the center of attention, but there will likely be a memory bus along with other architectures, such as ethernet or USB, to move data around. Interacting with the world around us requires some sort of sensor to read the room, while other circuits are used to feed this processed data back to the user.

How do inspection discipline and sampling plans decide whether a shipment ships or gets torn apart?

Before going into PCB design, my employer was in the telecom business. I started out putting PCBs into antistatic bags, then into individual boxes with appropriate labels. A group of eight distinct boards was placed in a larger box to form a die group. The big box labeling reflected the part-dash number and revision for each board. This was called “final prep” and was the last step prior to shipping.