In today’s fast-paced world, PCB design teams face the challenge of delivering increasingly complex products on tighter schedules. Stay ahead by embracing the best practices of modern PCB design, organized into the five pillars of digital transformation.

Creating a digitally integrated solution across multiple domains minimizes manual intervention, enhances collaboration, and improves transparency across disciplines. In a digitally integrated and optimized multi-domain environment, engineering teams—including IC, IC packaging, FPGA, PCB design, mechanical, and software—can optimize project costs, speed up design time, manage data integrity, and enhance result quality. Key best practices to achieve this include:

• ECAD/MCAD collaboration
• Design/Manufacturing integration
• Library and data management

While the PCB design process remains consistent regardless of the tool, team, company, or culture, the real differentiator lies in execution. Engineering productivity and efficiency are crucial for:

• Predictably and reliably managing complex, high-capacity designs
• Leveraging advanced interactive and automated design support to speed up routine tasks
• Ensuring correct-by-construction designs through a constraint-driven process
• Implementing concurrent team design to reduce cycle times

Best practices to enhance engineering productivity and efficiency include:

• Design automation
• Analog/digital/RF integration
• Concurrent design
• Design reuse
• Constraint-driven design
• Advanced design techniques

As product and design complexity grow, so do the tools and processes required. By integrating verification throughout the PCB design process—starting early, long before physical prototypes—engineering teams can streamline the entire electronic systems design and enhance design quality through digital-prototype driven, shift-left verification and cross-domain modeling.

Shift-left verification in the design flow removes specialist bottlenecks with automated, integrated tools. This approach saves time and costs by identifying problems early, during the design phase, minimizing design iterations and manufacturing respins. Best practices to enable digital-prototype driven verification include a shift-left approach to:

• Schematic analysis
• Thermal analysis
• SI/PI
• AMS
• Manufacturability

From system requirements to implementation and manufacturing, a model-based systems engineering approach provides a holistic view of the entire system—electronic, electrical, mechanical, and software. This enables team members to model components, defining and optimizing interconnectivity and traceability across domains. Best practices to enable system-level model-based engineering include:

• Multi-board integration
• Electrical/electronic coordination
• FPGA/PCB optimization
• IC/Package/PCB alignment

Electronic systems design companies rely on a value chain of suppliers and manufacturing services to bring successful products to market. Today, connecting product demand with the supply of essential parts is more complex than ever. The solution lies in designing for supply chain resilience.

Key practices to enable supply chain resilience include:

• BOM validation
• Ensuring best-known part availability
• Validation of alternate components