The simple principle of circuit board design is that it must be suitable for its intended application, not the other way around. Therefore, as a PCB designer, you will find that there are many different PCB size and shape requirements. Here are some ideas about excellent ways to use these different circuit board dimensions.
Know the size and shape requirements of PCB before starting layout.
It can satisfy the worry of radical schedule and design delay. It is understandable why some PCB layout designers will open their eyes to start their circuit board design. Of course, the problem is that they may lack key design information, especially in terms of size or outline dimensions or circuit board outline. When it comes to PCB layout, medium-sized design changes have become a reality. One thing you need to do is to deepen the impact of future changes without complete information from the beginning. Without good PCB outline data to do the preliminary work, you may face the possibility of having to redesign a lot later.
To avoid such problems, please make sure you know the size and shape requirements of the design before starting the layout. This includes not only the X and Y dimensions of the board, but also the height limit. This will require close cooperation with your entire design team to get the required information. And don’t hesitate to ask as many questions as possible. You don’t want to suffer from having to replace many circuits in the design in the future, because you don’t realize that there will be mounting holes in the place where the main processor is placed.
With the required circuit board data, you can now use several different options to create a circuit board outline.
In the past, PCB design tools were more obstacles than help when drafting objects such as circuit board outlines. Fortunately, these tools have been developed for many years, and users can now use several options to create circuit board outlines.
You can draw a layout tool utility so that designers can manually draw the outline of their circuit boards. These tools will not only create the main outline for you, but also add other outlines for layout and routing constraints. In addition, you can use the drawing function in the tool to manipulate the contour lines and create arcs or other graphic features to finally determine the required size and shape.
Many design tools will also provide you with creation wizards, which will automatically complete the drafting of the outline of the circuit board. The wizard not only contains tools for creating circuit board outlines, but also builds circuit board layer stacks and sets the basic trace width and pitch size. This wizard can save you a lot of time and effort in creating circuit board outlines.
In addition to these drawing tools, modern PCB design CAD systems usually provide you with other useful utilities to deal with circuit board outlines. When dealing with complex circuit board shapes, a very important function is to import mechanical CAD data into PCB database. The data can be in many different formats, including DXF, IDF, IDX and IPC-2581.
Your PCB design CAD system will read these formats and create circuit board outlines accordingly. You can even save these outlines as templates for reuse in new designs. Of course, the key is to use a CAD system that supports all these different functions.
The importance of a complete design tool system
A good PCB design CAD system can not only support different import formats and provide you with a large number of drawing tools, but also provide many other benefits. One of the most useful functions is the ability to display PCB layout and mechanical design simultaneously in the layout tool. This enables designers to see how their layout works in the whole system design. With the 3D function of the layout tool, designers can interactively handle their component placement in real time, and correct all gap errors of design mechanical features.
