Like all new technologies, it took a long time for engineers to accept and promote PCB boards. In the 1960s, Zeneth, a veteran American electronics company, always advertised that they used point-to-point wiring, as shown in Figure 1. Now, almost all electronic products are made of PCB.
But over the years, PCB seems to have been "downgraded" in the field of electronic engineering, and has become an unsung hero who only pays silently behind the scenes. Managers believe that PCB wiring is a trivial manufacturing problem, not a design engineer needs to care about; but as digital circuits change Faster and faster, and RF circuits are also put into the PCB, the circuit board has become a limiting factor in many designs. Although computer-aided design (CAD) tools can help engineers design circuit boards, the automatic winding function of CAD is usually Will bring more problems.
Modern PCB is not only a time killer, but also a key component with precise design requirements; the operating frequency and signal rise/fall time of electronic devices are becoming faster and faster, so PCB has become more and more important.
Don't neglect your PCB design, pay great attention to the recommendations of the component specification table; application engineers from semiconductor manufacturers can give you a lot of help. But it should be noted that the application engineers of semiconductor manufacturers are IC experts, not system engineers, so they may tell you today to separate the analog and digital ground planes and link them with an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) chip; but they I won’t tell you what to do if there are 5 ADCs on the board.
To learn more about PCB design know-how, there are many training courses and technical seminars you can participate in. Professional senior engineers will teach you how to properly use component layout and winding rules to prevent your design from generating noise or being sensitive to noise; you You can also learn to ensure that your design has good signal and power integrity.
If you don’t want your product design to be messy or problematic, you absolutely need to learn all about PCB design and manufacturing. That is the basis of your product design, just like the foundation of a house. No one wants It wobbly!