Sunday, May 7, 2017

My WorkFlow

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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