PCB design references and roadmap

Question

I am a fresh electrical engineering graduate. I want to learn PCB design and I don't know where to start. Most courses on the internet explain basic electronics taught in university, but nothing practical or technical to actually design your own board.

Can anybody please provide me with a reference or route that provides technical details in designing my own boards? (If anything useful about LED boards as well.)

Anything related to circuit design is useful for me. Any book that covers such technical knowledge is very good, in most cases the books I read explains every electronic part and how it works; what I need is how all these parts work together.

Thank you.

Answer 1

There are plenty of very good PCB design tutorials on YouTube. I would suggest you install KiCad and start following one of the tutorial series.

Go through the complete process of selecting components, entering the schematic, designing the layout, ordering a PCB, populating components on it and verifying the board. You can select an easy circuit for your first project. 5-10 components, 2 layers. The whole process should take 2-3 weeks and $20-30 if you are able to figure it out correctly.

If you have money and time to spare, build a few boards of increasing complexity through the complete process. Watch more tutorials, board reviews and forums to learn the tricks of the trade along the way.

Answer 2

There are two main parts to making a PCB.

1. The actual process of selecting physical parts (resistors etc), sizing the board shape, and laying out the parts and traces. Yep that's all one part.
2. The science of PCB layout is based on physics. Is the copper cross-section big enough to prevent a DC drop for X amount of current. Is the trace impedance correct for the signal type? Is this via causing a discontinuity, do you need multiple vias to reduce inductance or increase thermal conductivity? Is the spacing between copper large enough for the voltages used? Any many more.

Number two is by far the more difficult part to master, but there are some good resources to help you out. A really good PCB calculator is put out by Saturn PCB. It's called the Saturn PCB Toolkit. It can help you with the calculations for traces, vias etc.
Another great resource is a book by Howard Johnson, High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic. While it focuses on highspeed design, the concepts can be used at any frequency, it is physics after all. You'd be hard pressed to find a board that followed the principals from this book that didn't work because it wasn't a high speed circuit.

Answer 3

There are many good online tutorials. Robert Feranec, Phil Salmony of Phil's Lab are two. Dave Jones of EEVblog has some Altium-based (but generally useful) tutorials covering production-oriented topics like panelization and fiducials. You should also study the recommended layout for things that are more fussy than LEDs such as switchmode converters and RF circuits.

You'll find there are many ways of getting to the end result, especially when it comes to library organization and how you deal with different components. Some approaches put more work up-front and others are more oriented to getting to the result fast. If you take the time to find or create accurate 3D models for major components you can help avoid mechanical problems by using a full PCB model in the MCAD modelling, and create beautiful rendering for documentation, but that might greatly increase the total time the first time you have to use a new set of components.

For simple boards, I suggest starting by doing some tutorials and using KiCad and just having some boards made. They are incredibly cheap these days (especially for simple 2 and even 4-layer boards) if you're not in a great hurry, and there's nothing like actually seeing and soldering to the results even if it isn't perfect. The inexpensive vendors have decent online checking for major issues and will generally make pretty much what you ask for (which does not always equal what you actually want).

Phil's Lab covers much of what even an advanced hobbyist or more might want to do.

Hardware design - designing the circuit that you want to put down onto a PCB is a much more involved topic. Even though you have an Engineering degree, there is still much to be learned, but between app notes, tutorials, books, and even advanced courses you can get there and have fun on the way.