Recently I was asked to share my workflow for designing printed circuit boards, so here it is . . .
About Me
I started my electronics career in the U.S Navy and worked with mil-spec requirements for 20+ years, then transitioned to commercial high-tech startups. I'm on my 4th high-tech startup, currently working at Ingenu.
You can find my resume and work history online at Linked In.
My Workflow
I release 20+ designs per year, my current duties includes company CAD Librarian, PCB Designer, Schematic Capture, BOM Generation, Fab and Assembly Drawings, which I upload to Agile (PLM) for review and release.
Here's an interesting series of PLM articles that I authored.
I use a Just in Time workflow, always keeping one step ahead my electrical design engineers. I mentor the team for all schematic capture related efforts and provide napkin drawings to schematic capture services if needed.
Up to 25% of the parts initially placed in schematics never make it to the layout stage, so creating footprints before the electrical design is frozen may be a waste of time. During the schematic design reviews I poll the team and determine which components are likely make it through the design reviews, then as needed I create footprints for those parts.
I use an Access database (Parts) which is lightening fast. Using drag and drop techniques I create similar parts in less than 15 seconds.
See Getting Started with Parts (YouTube 14 minutes) if you would like to see the Parts Frontend application in action.
I use PCB Libraries (Tom Hausherr's tool) to create footprints or download footprints from the Parts on Demand (POD) service. I was on the PCB Libraries beta team.
My favorite PCB calculator is the Saturn PCB Design Toolkit, created by Kenneth Wood. I collaborated with Ken to add and enhance features in the PCB Design Toolkit.
For viewing Gerbers I use GC-Prevue.
For viewing ODB++ I use Pentalogix's ViewMate.
That's it !
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