Standards: The Roadmap for Your Ideal Data Package

Estimated reading time: 1 minute

Whether you’re designing a simple commercial PCB or a cutting-edge board headed for Mars, you’ll still need to create the perfect design data package—hopefully one that’s complete and accurate.

In this interview, IPC design instructor Kris Moyer explains how standards can help you ensure that your data package has all the information your fabricator and assembler need to build your board the way you designed it, allowing them to use their expertise. As Kris says, even with IPC standards, there’s still an art to conveying the right information in your documentation.

Andy Shaughnessy: Kris, when it comes to creating the ideal design data package for your particular design, you say everyone will have a slightly different data package, because each design has different requirements. What do designers need to know about creating their ideal data package?

Kris Moyer: First, if you look in the IPC standards for documentation, especially the IPC-2610 series, we've defined various levels of documentation and what we call completeness. It's a grading system. The completeness mode defines whether you're at an engineering concept, consumer good level of documentation, a prototype level, or a full high-reliability production level, and what levels and types of information and completeness of information are needed.

So, having an understanding of that is definitely a good first step. Beyond that, it’s critical to know what markets you're in. For example, if you're in military and aerospace, where you need to define a product with a shelf life of a half-century and must be manufactured the same way for 50 years, you need a different level of documentation than a consumer good that will be obsolete in 18 months. Understanding your market segment, what is required of it, and the reliability goal all go back to IPC performance classifications.

To read the entire interview, which originally appeared in the May 2025 issue of Design007 Magazine, click here.