One could spend hours trying to make the board look pretty, doing the correct routing, grounding, decoupling. In the end the only thing that matters is that it passes EMC testing.
Can one ever be considered good at PCB layout until they have at least a couple of designs under their belt which have passed EMC testing?
spend hours trying to make the board look pretty, doing the correct routing, grounding, decoupling...
Wrong, wrong, wrong. EMC testing is hardly “the only thing that matters”. What about trace impedance? What about timing constraints? What about testing? What about manufacturability? What about thermal considerations? What about trace current capacity?
the get-go they will need A LOT of money and access to a testing lab before they can really pursue a career in electronics design...
I would say just do a PCB with all the positive and negative side effects. Usually the first PCBs are based on a reference design anyway there's little someone can do wrong.
Learning by failing. I just did an FPGA project and failed like 2 weeks with it until the failing paths were sorted out.
But interestingly I also got the information there are many more skills required for what I want to do.
When doing my first PCB I jumped into the cold water (without any knowledge, since I'm a software guy) and it surprisingly worked.
A company has quoted me 25.000 USD for designing it, I decided to buy a good EDA software and electronic equipment instead to do it myself. I have sourced which equipment I need in the internet (the only bad part was a tektronix oscilloscope with too less memory). That was like 5 years ago and I turned it into a business.
My motivation: I once worked for a small IC design house, their hardware engineers were so bad (design and layout) so I thought I can be that terrible too at least.
However all that is very time consuming, I did not take it easy going since I wanted to fund my life out of this, additionally I did that in [swearing] [a crappy country with no future for me in central europe], nowadays I have left the country because the taxes are unreasonable high (and they really put all the risk on the small business' [after taxes], also they won't help at all and kick you into your butt if you're lying on the ground already.. ).
Thanks for your story, player80. You didn't mention anything about EMC testing. Have you had any experience?
I'm in Taiwan nowadays, I never had any issue with EMC (maybe luck, or I have just studied too many competitive products well enough before I did my pcbs)?
Although I went to a lab several times (due to several products) before pushing out my products. Just go to a lab nearby and ask if they can help or advice some help.
Different products will have different requirements!
Especially the smaller labs which I have visited looked like they're able to help.
You would have to disclose your product if you want to get help in that direction, either in real life or in this forum.
For diving a bit into EMV you can check some youtube videos (which you might have seen already), but as mentioned if you ask for help people for sure need to know your product.
Do you mainly use 2 layer or 4+ layer PCBs for your products? Getting mixed advice from the internet about whether it's possible to pass EMC with 2-layer PCBs sometimes. On the other hand, have only ever seen 2-layer PCBs in tear-downs.
The most important skill a PCB designer learns from experience is component placement, that is the number one skill you need to do correct layouts.
High frequency loops should be always short. You'll have bypass caps and possibly filter inductors between the power supply and the high frequent switching stage.Where do you put the input power to serve the outputs with nice short loops without affecting all the other circuits on the PCB?
The most important skill a PCB designer learns from experience is component placement, that is the number one skill you need to do correct layouts.
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