PCB Technical - Ways to improve efficiency in PCB board design

PCB board design is a critical and time-consuming task. Any problems that arise require PCB engineers to check the entire PCB board design on a network-by-component basis. It can be said that the level of care required for PCB board design is no less than that of chip design. A typical PCB board design process consists of the following steps:
The first three steps take the most time, because PCB schematic inspection is a manual process. Imagine an SoC board with 1,000 or more connections. Manually checking each connection is a tedious task. In fact, it is almost impossible to check every connection, which will lead to problems with the final PCB board, such as wrong connections, floating nodes, etc.

The PCB schematic capture stage generally faces the following types of problems:
Underline error: such as APLLVDD and APLL_VDD
Capitalization issues: such as VDDE and vdde, spelling errors, signal short-circuit issues, etc.
In order to avoid these errors, there should be a way to check the complete PCB schematic within a few seconds. This method can be realized by PCB schematic diagram simulation, and PCB schematic diagram simulation is rarely seen in the current circuit board design process. Through PCB schematic simulation, the final output results can be observed at the required nodes, so it can automatically check all connection problems. The following is explained through a project example. Consider a typical block diagram of a PCB board:
In a complex PCB board design, the number of wires may reach thousands, and a very small amount of changes may waste a lot of time to check. Schematic simulation can not only save design time, but also improve the quality of the circuit board and improve the efficiency of the entire process.

A typical DUT has the following signals:
The device under test will have various signals after some pre-adjustment, and there are various modules, such as voltage regulators, operational amplifiers, etc., for signal adjustment. Consider an example of a power supply signal obtained by a voltage regulator:

In order to verify the connection relationship and perform an overall inspection, schematic simulation is used. Schematic simulation is composed of schematic creation, test platform creation and simulation. During the creation of the test platform, an excitation signal is given to the necessary input terminal, and then the output result is observed at the signal point of interest. The above process can be achieved by connecting the probe to the node to be observed. The node voltage and waveform can indicate whether there are errors in the schematic. All signal connections are automatically checked.
With the help of simulation, we can directly observe the results to confirm whether the schematic diagram of the PCB board is correct. In addition, by carefully adjusting the excitation signal or component values, it is also possible to investigate the PCB board design changes. Therefore, schematic simulation can save a lot of time for circuit board design and inspection personnel, and increase the accuracy of circuit board design.