PCB Designing – The Many Challenges It Poses

Printed circuit boards or PCBs by far are the most commonly used components for assembling modern electronic circuits. It usually comprises of one or more insulating layers and one or more copper layers sandwiched together. These layers have the signal traces, the grounds and powers. Designing of the layout associated with the printed circuit boards can itself be challenging, similarly as that of the electrical circuit.

The latest systems include multilayer boards that can have up to eight layers or sometimes even more. Earlier, the components used to be mounted on the topmost layer in the holes which would extend through all the layers. These are known as "through the hole components". More lately, along with the close adaptation of surface mounted constituents, one can normally find the constituents mounted on the top as well as the bottom layers. The printed circuit board design is as equally important as the circuit design and performance of the finished system in general.

Printed circuit board issues, which are supposed to be harmful to the accuracy of the circuit performance consist of leak resistances, IR power drops in the trace foils, ground planes, the control of stray capacitance, and the dielectric absorption (DA). Additionally, the printed circuit boards tend to absorb atmospheric moisture, also known as hygroscopicity, which indicates that alterations in humidity, can often cause the inputs of some scrounging effects to differ from day to day.

Generally, printed circuit board design effects can be classified into two wide categories:

• The ones that usually affect the static or DC process of the circuit,
• The ones that affect dynamic or AC circuit process, particularly at high frequencies.

One more broad area of the printed circuit board design is the area of grounding. Grounding is another problem area, which is, in itself, related to all the mixed signal designs, and we can say that implementing a printed circuit board based system simply does not alter the fact that more improvised techniques are required. To be fortunate, some ideologies of quality grounding, mainly making use of ground planes, are built in to the printed circuit board surroundings. This factor is one of the most significant benefits of analog designs based on PCBs.

Some other features of grounding that need to be managed comprise of the controls of false ground and return signal voltages which can get affect its performance negatively. These voltages can be a result ofoutside signal coupling, frequent currents, or just excessive IR drops in the ground conductors. Appropriate conductor sizing and routing as well as discrepancy signal management and ground separation techniques, in turn enables the control of similar parasitic voltages.

Another important area related to PCB designing is the grounding done appropriately for a mixed signal, analog or digital surroundings. To be very specific, the only issue relating to quality grounding is that it can interfere with the whole layout philosophy of a good performing PCB design.

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About The Author

James Whitehall is an expert when it comes to printed circuit board manufacturing and design. He loves writing interesting articles and blogs about the topic and recommends PCBCart.com as the name to trust if you are looking printed circuit board fabrication services and support.