Helping Your Team Build in Manufacturability from Day One

Milwaukee Electronics' Design Group combines its expertise with industry-standard design guidelines to help your team develop a PCB layout that is manufacturable, testable and in compliance with any specialized requirements. The benefit of using a team expert in electronic design, circuit board design and manufacturing is that we look at the process holistically to eliminate issues before they create problems in the PCB design process.

We start the process by evaluating your design. We look for any mechanical constraints that could impact automated manufacturing including PCB shape, placement of mounting holes or fidicials, and critical component placement. We then compare the layout file padstacks with IPC standards, and then verify that the layout file padstacks and footprints match the components specified in the bill of materials and/or part specification.

Our team also looks at compliance requirements, such as UL, to ensure that our layout will ultimately support them. The next step is understanding critical trace current and voltage requirements. We also look at critical placements with respect to layer count, impedance matching and length matching. If multiple planes are utilized, we plan for the ground plane. Once these key issues are addressed we place the remaining parts.

While our initial process considers many of the elements necessary for a manufacturable design, our next step is to hold a design for manufacturability review with our manufacturing team to determine if any more improvement opportunities are available.

Once customer approval of parts placement is received, we hand route the remaining traces and perform a design rules check for conductivity and trace spacing. Following customer approval of the PCB layout, we generate fab drawings which specify layer stackup, impedance, solder mask and PCB finish.

The end result is a PCB documentation package ready for a fast project launch, thanks to proactive elimination of the typical errors that cause unanticipated respins and/or defect opportunities.