Introduction and Important Terminology

Welcome to the Altium Academy Printed Circuit Board design

course! Throughout this course, you’ll be introduced to important
ideas involved in PCB design, manufacturing, and assembly. You’ll
also get some exposure to industry-standard PCB design software,
and you’ll have a chance to use this software to build your own PCB.
Hopefully, by the end of the course, you’ll have enough knowledge
to design some simpler PCBs and to start taking more advanced
industry-level circuit board design and manufacturing courses.

PCB design is as much art as it is science. Some of the important

concepts in PCB design rely heavily on knowledge from your prior
electronics classes. However, PCB design also requires creativity in
how you select components, place them on a circuit board, and
connect them with copper. There is also the design of the bare
board itself, something that forms the foundation of PCB design and
manufacturing. One of the main goals of this course is to give you
the knowledge needed to start designing PCBs. We’ll look at
examples of real boards to explain why certain design decisions are
made and to show how professional designers approach their circuit
board designs.

Throughout this course, you’ll have a chance to use Altium Designer,

a popular PCB design software package that is used by professionals
in the electronics industry. Although some of the lessons and
demonstrations will be provided using Altium Designer, you should
be able to perform the tasks shown in this course using any other
PCB design software application. Guides and walkthroughs will be
shown using Altium Designer, so students are encouraged to follow
along on their own using an Altium student license, or using a
different CAD program.

What is Printed Circuit Board Design?

If you’ve ever opened up an old laptop or smartphone, then you’ve already seen an
example of a printed circuit board (PCB). While PCBs can come in all shapes and
sizes, they all have common characteristics that are considered during design. A PCB
can be very simple, just involving a few components, or they can be very complex,
involving thousands of small components and interconnections. All PCBs should be
designed while considering the manufacturing process to ensure that a new product
can be produced at scale.
Why is Printed Circuit Board Design
Important?
PCBs represent the intersection between all the major types of electronic equipment.
Without PCBs, integrated circuits would not be able to connect to communicate with
each other in a low-noise environment. It would not be possible to produce products
like computers, televisions, modern automobiles, smart phones, satellites, aircraft, and
many other devices in their current form. Printed circuit boards do more than just
provide a place to put integrated circuits, they provide a way to create very reliable
connections between components that can also be manufactured at very high volume.

To a beginner, a circuit board might be seen as an overblown method for connecting

electronic components together. This is understandable when looking at the surface of
some circuit boards. However, once you look below the surface and into the interior
layers of a circuit board, there is a beautiful complexity that provides the connections
needed to make modern electronics work. In the past, electronics could be freely
strung together with hanging wires, but the nature of modern integrated circuits
continually forces design engineers to keep innovating and find new ways to make
their designs work as intended.
Complex designs like this server motherboard force PCB designers to continuously
innovate.

If you look around your own home and think about the number of electronic devices
you own, it’s important to note that any of these devices could contain at least one
circuit board. It’s highly likely that, at any given moment, you’re surrounded by a
dozen or more circuit boards. PCBs are truly the backbone of modern electronics.

PCB Design Software

At the center of PCB design is the use of specialized electronics CAD

(ECAD) software. An entire industry has developed around ECAD
tools for PCB design, as well as specialized electrical simulators that
are used to evaluate designs before they are manufactured. There is
also a host of manufacturing software that is used to prepare a
design for fabrication and assembly using automated machinery,
called computer aided manufacturing (CAM) software. In this course,
we won’t focus so much on using CAM software, although we will
look at the steps needed to take a finished design and prepare it for
manufacturing.

If you look at printed circuit board design software, the view you see
may not be the most intuitive. The view you get in ECAD software
does not look very much like an actual circuit board you might pull
out of your computer or smartphone. In fact, compared to
something like a mechanical design, the circuit board you see in
your ECAD software may look very strange.

The image below shows an example of a circuit board layout in

Altium Designer. This layout may not clearly resemble a real,
assembled PCB you would find in an off-the-shelf product. One goal
of this course is to teach you how to navigate one of these CAD
drawings and identify various structures within the drawing.
An example PCB layout in Altium Designer.

While it may not be obvious, this circuit board is actually the

motherboard for a small computer, and it is available as a sample
project within Altium Designer. In this view, we’re only looking at the
features in the top-most layer of the board. This board is actually
very complex, comprising multiple layers and components on both
sides of the board. We’ll return to this layout periodically to show
some examples of common features found in PCBs.

Some Basic Terms to Help You Get Started

in This Course
There is some important terminology that is used to describe PCBs,
and this terminology will be used throughout the course in various
locations. All of the important terminology has been compiled into
a course glossary, you should refer to this document periodically as
you work through the course. Some of the important terms to help
you get started and progress through the rest of this unit are listed
here:

Components: This can refer to anything that can be soldered onto

a PCB. Examples include resistors, capacitors, connectors, and
integrated circuits. A component is also an object in a CAD program,
and it may refer to a physical feature that is not soldered onto the
board.

Printed circuit board (PCB or circuit board): Refers to the bare

board design without any of the assembled components.

PCB layout: A CAD drawing showing the location of all elements

that will appear on an assembled PCB. This includes all components
and copper that will appear on both sides of a PCB.

Trace: A copper connection made between two components in a

PCB layout. A trace is sometimes called a “track”.

Layers: All PCBs can have multiple layers, which will include copper
connections and components. Internal layers only contain copper,
which are only used to make electrical connections. There are two
types of layers in any PCB: plane layers and signal layers. A plane
layer has a large, uninterrupted copper region that covers the entire
layer. A signal layer only contains copper traces that connect the
PCB components.
Multilayer PCB: This term refers to any circuit board that has more
than two copper layers in total.

PCB stackup: Also called a layer stack, this term refers to the
arrangement of layers used to build a bare printed circuit board.

Schematic sheets: Drawings that show how components are

connected to each other, similar to a circuit diagram.

PCB fabrication: Refers to the first half of the manufacturing

process, where each layer of a bare PCB is fabricated and copper
features are etched on the PCB.

PCB assembly (PCBA): This term has two meanings. It is often

used as a noun, referring to a fully assembled PCB. It also refers to
the PCB assembly process, where components are soldered onto a
bare PCB. In this course, we will normally write “PCBA” for the
former, and “PCB assembly” for the latter.

PCB laminate: Also simply called a laminate, this refers to the

insulating material used to separate copper layers and build a PCB
stackup.
Like many industries, the electronics industry has developed its own
terminology, and you will be exposed to many important terms used
by design professionals throughout this course. As the course
progresses, new terminology will be introduced as it’s needed, but
these terms will come up repeatedly to refer to some of the
important physical and electrical aspects of all PCBs.

In the next section, we’ll see how CAD tools are used to create PCBs.
These software packages are highly specialized for use in creating a
PCB layout and manufacturing files, and using CAD tools will be a
major focus in this course.

https://resources.altium.com/p/how-to-become-a-pcb-designer-in-today-s-world

https://resources.altium.com/p/getting-started-pcb-design
An important aspect of any engineering design course is learning to
use CAD software, and PCB design is no different. PCB designers use
specialized CAD tools to create the physical layout of a printed
circuit board. When we say “physical layout”, we’re referring to the
arrangement of components, pads, traces, vias, and any other
component or physical element that will be placed on the PCB.

Technically, you could use any CAD program to create a physical

layout of a PCB. However, the industry has developed specialized
software, called ECAD software, that helps automate many of the
tasks involved in creating drawings of a physical layout. Altium
Designer is one such program, but there are many others that use
similar workflows and have similar tool sets for creating PCB layouts.

The files you create in your ECAD software will store all the
information needed to understand and manufacture a design. The
PCB layout is most important because it is like a picture of the board
that will be fabricated and assembled by a PCB manufacturer.
However, a PCB layout is not the only document you’ll work on in
your CAD tools. It is also important to understand the primary set of
files you’ll need for a design. Different ECAD applications use
different sets of files to store design information, but there are a few
common file types that are used in every design.

Common PCB Files

When designing a PCB, there are four major types of documents you
will need to create a design:

 Schematic sheets: Your schematic sheets are like the

electrical blueprint for your design. These documents show
components, nets, and other information needed to
understand the design.
  Bill of materials: This document is a list of all components
used in the design. It will be used to order components and to
aid assembly.

 PCB layout: This document shows the physical placement of

components and copper connections between them. The PCB
layout document will also describe the layer stack used in the
design.

 PCB libraries: Your libraries store all of the CAD data for your
components (schematic symbols, PCB footprints, 3D models,
and SPICE subcircuits). Libraries also store procurement
information for each component, including MPN, distributor
information, a description of each component, quantities of
each component, and possible alternative components.

These four types of documents are the minimum needed to create

the physical design for your board, but they aren’t the only
documents used in PCB development. The design can’t be prepared
for fabrication until the PCB layout is finished. Once the layout is
complete, there is another set of fabrication and assembly files that
are used in PCB manufacturing processes. We’ll cover
manufacturing files in more detail in the next section.

Schematic Sheets

All designs will start with schematic sheets. These files are drawings
that show which components are used in the design, the nets used
to make electrical connections between components, connections
involving power and ground nets, net names, and other notes
needed to understand how the design works. An example of a
typical schematic sheet is shown below:

Example schematic sheet for a low-voltage power regulator in

Altium Designer.

A PCB design project could have several schematic sheets, all of

which show the electrical information in your PCB layout.
Schematics show several important pieces of information that are
not contained in the PCB layout.

What’s in schematic sheets What’s not in schematic sheets

- All components that are used in the - Physical location of components in a PCB layout
design - Whether nets are composed of traces, vias,
- Nets that make electrical connections planes, or polygons
between components - Whether an interconnect passes through a plane
- Any components like connectors that layer, cable, or other element
may be part of an interconnect - Whether planes, traces, connectors, etc. are
- The power and ground connections on used to supply power to components
 What’s in schematic sheets What’s not in schematic sheets

various components - How copper is routed between ports to create a

- Port connections used to define nets that physical electrical connection
span between two sheets

To see how these different pieces of information are stored in a

schematic, consider the example shown below from the MiniPC
example project in Altium Designer (introduced briefly in Lesson 1).
This example shows a portion of a schematic sheet with a USB
bridge chip and two capacitor banks. We can see power nets
connected to two capacitor banks (named IO_3V3 and IO_1V8), and
these same power nets are connected to the USB bridge. We can
also see that there is a ground connection on the capacitor banks
and the USB bridge component.

Example schematic sheet for a low-voltage power regulator in

Altium Designer. Note that this schematic is only a portion of a
schematic sheet that is part of a larger project.
Because we have the GND net connected to the USB bridge and
both of the capacitor banks, we know that these three portions of
the design will be connected in the PCB layout with copper. The
schematic only shows us that these connections exist; it does not
show how they are connected on the PCB. In the PCB layout, we
could make this connection with a polygon, plane layer, or traces
and vias. How you should make this connection requires some
judgement and experience.

There is another net in this schematic sheet named USB3_VBUS.

This net connects to a different component in our schematics that is
not shown here. It is common to use net names to indicate electrical
connections rather than drawing a wire to represent the connection.
This prevents unnecessary clutter in a schematic sheet, and this
practice allows connections between different schematic sheets to
be defined.

PCB Layout

The PCB layout file contains the location of any physical element
that will appear in the PCBA. The PCB layout file will also describe
the stackup used to build the PCBA. Some ECAD applications will
place the stackup in an external file, while Altium Designer encodes
all of the PCB layout data in a single file. The stackup for a PCB can
be viewed graphically in your ECAD software.

The image below shows a portion of the stackup in the MiniPC

project. This PCB contains 16 layers, so only a portion of the stackup
is shown. From here, we can see the thickness of the core and
prepreg layers, the copper weight used in each layer, and the
dielectric constant for each laminate material in the PCB stackup.
The MiniPC PCB has a total of 16 layers, so only a portion of the
layer stack is shown below.

Every component in a schematic has a corresponding footprint that

appears in the PCB layout. You can spot the correspondence
between these documents by looking at the reference designator.
The image below shows the PCB footprint for the USB bridge
component in the above schematic. Only the component outline,
pad locations, and reference designators are shown for clarity.
It’s very important to keep all of your design documents
synchronized. As you work through a design, sometimes you may
need to make a modification, like delete or add a new component,
change a net name, update a reference designator, and some other
tasks. Synchronization goes in both directions: if you make one of
these changes in your schematics, you will then need to import that
change into the PCB layout. Similarly, if a change to a design is
made in the PCB layout, it will need to be imported back into the
schematics. ECAD software has built-in features that help automate
this synchronization.

More advanced ECAD software will allow you to work with 3D models
of your PCB so that you can see a realistic visualization of an
assembled board. The image below shows a 3D view of the MiniPC
PCB built in Altium Designer.
Bill of Materials

Typically, when starting a new design project, you will have a rough
idea of the components needed in the design, or you will know
which circuits you need to build into the design. As you select
components and design your circuits, new components will be added
to your bill of materials until you’ve completed the design. You won’t
have to add components to the bill of materials manually. As you
add components to a design, ECAD software does an excellent job of
adding the components to your bill of materials automatically.

A bill of materials is normally exported from your ECAD software as

a PDF file or as an Excel file. This file will contain a large table, with
each row being an entry for different components in the design. The
image below shows an the entry in the bill of materials for the USB
bridge component shown earlier:

Each unique component will have its own entry in the bill of
materials. If a component is used multiple times, you will see
multiple entries in the “Designator” column for that component. The
value “U33” in the above entry is the reference designator for the
USB bridge component. This tells you exactly which schematic
symbol and PCB footprint corresponds to this component in your
other design documents.

Each entry in a bill of materials has a corresponding entry in the PCB

layout.

Data that is common to the above three sets of documents is stored

in your PCB libraries. Different ECAD applications have different
formats and structures for their libraries, but all libraries will include
the same set of required information. Your libraries are like the glue
that holds all the other documents together and ensures your design
data remains synchronized. Many times, a designer will need to
build libraries from scratch, either by creating CAD data (symbols
and PCB footprints), downloading data from manufacturers or
vendors, or finding data from other designers online.

CAD tools and the ECAD documents described in this section will
become the major focus in upcoming sections of this course. It’s also
very important to understand how these documents are used to
generate manufacturing files. These files and their role in the PCB
manufacturing process will be examined in the next section.

References

https://resources.altium.com/p/pcb-core-vs-prepreg-material-what-designers-need-to-
know

https://resources.altium.com/p/pcb-layout-tip-save-time-reusable-blocks

https://resources.altium.com/p/collecting-all-pieces-you-need-what-bill-materials