How to become PCB Board Designer?

[bhoobalan]

Hello friends,
I want to begin my carrier as PCB Board Designer. I have done electronics and communication engineering.
How to start learning PCB Board Designing ?
what i want to Know first?
Which tool i want to use?
How is the scope in this field in future?
What are the levels in the PCB Designing?

I chooses correct path or not?
If i am not means give me some option?

Please friends help me to start my new carrier
Thanks in advance


K.Bhoobalan

 

[Jackie.Jia]

You can download a tool （for example Altium Design），and buy a book about how to use the tool，and then follow the book step by step to draw schematic，layout PCB，It's easy to begin。

 

[Kick]

Hi,

You will get lot of pdf and documents related to PCB designing. My suggestion is first concentrate only one software and learn that thoroughly. I think EAGLE is best software for a beginner.

 

[Mattylad]

Oh no, is this going to be a my software is better than yours thread?

I would say that the OP has a lot of reading and googling (and more reading) to do.

 

[pragash]

i think altium is easy to start with since alot of online resources (in youtube) available.

I chooses correct path or not?
If i am not means give me some option?

Please friends help me to start my new carrier
Thanks in advance


K.Bhoobalan

looks like you have alot of interest in PCB design. but i believe analog, RF and digital/DSP design field have good prospect for future. field which makes you innovate is the best field i believe.

 

[Warpspeed]

There are two completely different paths you can go with this.

First might apply to working as a hands on electronics hardware design engineer for a very small company, where you will be required to complete your own electronics design by turning out a professional quality printed circuit board ready for production. You become a Jack of all trades, and producing circuit boards for production become just one of many required skills.

Most often the board may not be large or complex, and very simple PCB software with manual routing of tracks will be quite sufficient to get the job done.
If you are the only person in the company doing this type of work, you can develop your own short cuts and techniques and extensive detailed documentation may not be required.
This is the sort of thing you can teach yourself at home, its not difficult, it just takes time and practice to work up some speed and gain an artistic eye, and you can do it for free with popular readily available public domain software.

The other extreme is becoming a professional circuit board designer in a large company, possibly part of a large CAD team in a specialised drawing office.

You will be expected to be very familiar with high end software, and work on very complex projects along with others, keeping meticulous records with very high levels of discipline. You will become a PCB design specialist, and some of those guys are really really good.
But its not something you can teach yourself in a week.

You probably need to do a proper paid course and receive an official graduate qualification from one of the CAD software distributors.
You can then use that as a professional qualification to apply for jobs.

 

[marce]

Do you understand electronics?

Also have a look at similar threads where we have posted lots of info......

 

[andre_luis]

The first step to become a ( professional ) PCB electronic board designer is to have a minimum level of knowledge in various fields of the electronics which much often are spread at different subjects ( Power Design, Signal Integrity, EMI, Antennas, etc... ), therefore I strongly recommend you buy some good books if you really want to have expertise in this area.

The drawing process should not be seen as the last part in the sequence of the layout design, but the critical step which integrates all them, therefore there is no good layout designer well skilled in tools, but having gaps of knowledge. Believe me, there is always something more we can learn at the specialized readings, and it is preferable to be technically well prepared than running the risk of having a product line with problems due to a failure that could have been avoided.

 

[Mattylad]

i think altium is easy to start with since alot of online resources (in youtube) available.

Is that why it's one of the most asked about packages on here?

 

[Warpspeed]

Your best bet might be to contact one or more of the PCB manufacturing companies in your local area, and ask what is most popular software.

It varies over time, and probably from different countries.
What is hot in Europe right now may be very different to what is hot in the US.

 

[marce]

The software to an extent is secondary, there are always jobs and contracts going for (in NO particular order) Cadence, Zuken, Mentor or Altium based packages....
A good start may be looking at the IPC CID courses...
**broken link removed**

 

[Warpspeed]

One aspect not so far mentioned is that drawing the schematic and creating an error free net list is a very important part of PCB design.
Its really about half the total work, and a PCB designer would be expected to do that, as well as lay out the actual PCB.

 

[marce]

No a schematic is an engineers responsibility, they are created by the engineer and passed to the PCB designer, totally different job, set of skills etc. A schematic is not part of PCB design it is the creation of the circuit diagram that the PCB design is based on.....

 

[andre_luis]

a schematic is an engineers responsibility, they are created by the engineer and passed to the PCB designer, totally different job, set of skills etc.

I fully agree to that distinction of tasks, however for critical designs, although not mandatory, layout designers having additional skills is a plus. According to my own experience, there were not rare the occasions when after a quick review the finished PCB, I asked him to redraw due to the lack of knowledge in aspects of EMI.

 

[Warpspeed]

Design of the schematic is definitely an engineers responsibility, but it can (and often is) just a rough hand drawn sketch on sheets of paper.

If there is a company drawing office, it is a draughtsman's job to turn a hand drawn schematic into electronic format, including generating any new symbols for unusual components, entering details of parts that will later appear on a bill of materials, specify component designators (R1, R2, C27 etc) and generally deal with the task of fully documenting and correcting any missing details from the engineers hand drawn sketches.

In a small company the engineer does it all.
In much larger organizations a drawing office team does this.

Same with the strictly mechanical side, the engineer specifies plugs, sockets, fans, heat sinks and so on. But a professional design draughtsman draws up mechanical drawings and full official parts lists for fabrication of the metalwork, and all the documentation for final assembly by the production team.

These design draughtsman also add details like paint specifications and any parts that may need to be machined or electro plated.
They are specialists in this field, just as the electronic engineer is a specialist in his field.

All these tasks are not completely isolated, the electronic engineer provides guidance and advises on which tracks on a PCB may be critical, grounding layout, specified wire gauges, EMC issues and so on. But the PCB designer usually creates both the electronic schematic and PCB because they are so intimately related to each other.

 

[marce]

Design of the schematic is definitely an engineers responsibility, but it can (and often is) just a rough hand drawn sketch on sheets of paper.

If there is a company drawing office, it is a draughtsman's job to turn a hand drawn schematic into electronic format, including generating any new symbols for unusual components, entering details of parts that will later appear on a bill of materials, specify component designators (R1, R2, C27 etc) and generally deal with the task of fully documenting and correcting any missing details from the engineers hand drawn sketches.

In a small company the engineer does it all.
In much larger organizations a drawing office team does this.

Same with the strictly mechanical side, the engineer specifies plugs, sockets, fans, heat sinks and so on. But a professional design draughtsman draws up mechanical drawings and full official parts lists for fabrication of the metalwork, and all the documentation for final assembly by the production team.

These design draughtsman also add details like paint specifications and any parts that may need to be machined or electro plated.
They are specialists in this field, just as the electronic engineer is a specialist in his field.

All these tasks are not completely isolated, the electronic engineer provides guidance and advises on which tracks on a PCB may be critical, grounding layout, specified wire gauges, EMC issues and so on. But the PCB designer usually creates both the electronic schematic and PCB because they are so intimately related to each other.

Very rare these days, those sort of companies have often gone bust.. Engineers enter the circuit diagram in a schematic capture program and have been doing for decades.....
It is as quicker for the engineer to enter the schematic than mess around doing sketches and having the circuit re-drawn and checked...
It is very rare now we get a schematic to draw from a customer or to re-draw one when on site... Its used to be done late 80s but now, if your doing it that way you need to modernise...
Design draughtsmen.... most mechanics are done 3D and those guys don't like being called draughtsmen these days (IDF, step) this is all very Olde Worlde and doesn't fit with todays modern practices, time to market requirements etc. Even the military based companies I work for have engineers draw schematics even if they still employ other archaic ways of working.....
As to engineers doing PCBs.... my comments on this are well known....

It makes me laugh (well cry actually) designing the boards for some super high tech project then having to use Gerber (my other pet peeve, well one of many with the way PCB design, designers etc. is always treated as an afterthought...

 

[Warpspeed]

It must have all changed hugely over the last ten years then, which is when I retired from all this.

But always, if the company was large enough to have separate, software engineering department, hardware engineering department, and a dedicated CAD/drawing office, the drawing office carried out and was responsible for creating and maintaining all the documentation, both printed and electronic.

 

[marce]

It has, most drawing offices as they were have been scrapped and people who worked in them made redundant, especially in the UK. A lot of this work gets farmed out to bureaus' etc. these days. I have been made redundant complete with all drawing office staff as a cost cutting exercise in...
1993, 1997, 2008, 2012...
I now work in a bureau and do work for the last two companies that made me redundant... the other two became victims of the general reduction of electronics in the west.....
Very few companies have traditional drawing offices these days... or drawing (configuration) controllers....

 

[Warpspeed]

I can well believe it, and its pretty sad for people that lose their livelihood.

Back in my youth I can remember when large companies all had a typing pool, dozens of women all clattering away on manual typewriters with carbon paper copies.
Word processing put an end to that....

Then there was the drawing office, with a row of huge drawing machines, and guys with pencils, rubbers, and ink pens creating originals sometimes taking weeks to create very detailed drawings or updating existing drawings for turning out "blueprints".

Haha, at one time a PCB designer used tape and donuts, red, blue, and black with a scalpel to lay out a board.
How many people here can remember that ?

 

[marce]

That's how I started out, tape ups, drawing board, stood up most of the day... totally different world then, but I have been luck to grow up with the change from manual to CAD, from basic 2D cad to 3D modelling, from basic ECAD (an electronic drawing board) to todays ECAD with SIV, Power integrity checks etc.
I have been lucky as I am a better designer due to my never ending apprenticeship.