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Connect the Dots: The Future of PCB Design and Manufacturing

For some time, I have been discussing the increasing complexity of PCBs and how designers can address the constantly evolving design requirements associated with them. My book, The Printed Circuit Designer’s Guide to… Designing for Reality, details best practices for creating manufacturable boards in a modern production environment.

It is also important to recognize that the process of board design has changed and will continue to do so. Electronic devices increasingly require complex boards with diverse functionalities, often with tight tolerances and a limited footprint. This makes it even more likely that designs are created by teams, not a lone designer sweating it out in an office armed with their favorite CAD tool and a coffee cup filled with determination.

The Trend Toward Team Design
Complex modern boards with diverse functionalities often require specialized expertise with radio frequency (RF) technology, flex PCBs, and high density interconnect (HDI) boards with high volumes of connections. Increasingly, we see designs that will be part of embedded or multi-board systems—interconnected PCBs, each handling a specific function. These designs require a lot of work and possess a great deal of complexity that can be a challenge for one person to handle.

With time-to-market pressure almost always a key factor on a project, there is often not enough time for a designer to informally solicit input from engineers or project managers and remain on schedule. To accelerate product launches and upgrades, organizations should leverage their available internal expertise related to elements such as schematics, layout, or testing and take a team approach to printed circuit design.

But internal does not always mean “in the room.” Members of the team may not be in the same building, time zone, or even country. Logistical challenges inherent with dispersed teams can create delays, such as the added days needed to schedule a meeting across time zones. Organizations are learning how to mitigate these challenges and realize the benefits associated with team design. Most organizations have gotten used to hybrid and remote workforces over the past few years, so a seasoned design team should be able to overcome common logistical challenges using the collaborative tools we have come to embrace. When hitting on all cylinders, an experienced team can accelerate design creation, limit iteration, and ensure a smooth transition to manufacturing.

Team Design Workflows and Best Practices
Dispersed design teams can speed development cycles by doing parallel work, leveraging specialized expertise when necessary, and collaborating in a more agile fashion. In general, I have found that effective team design workflows begin with sound preparation:

• Create your strategic plan by starting at a high level and working down to a more granular detail. Define success, identify potential obstacles to completion, and confirm that all necessary stakeholders have been included on the project.
• Build the project plan. Here, the team lays out individual roles and responsibilities, sets project milestones, and targets a completion date.
• Establish how the team will collaborate both internally and with manufacturing partners. Will there be regular meetings, primary reliance on collaborative tools like Slack, and formal use of a project management platform such as Asana or Trello?
• Define which design tools and technology applications are best suited to the project. Needs may vary depending on the project. Will teams be working concurrently, or will there be a series of handoffs? Does the project plan require modular design tools like Upverter?

Modular design offers teams the ability to have multiple people work concurrently on a board design at one time, each focused on their own section. Designs can be partitioned and assigned to team members based on available bandwidth or area of expertise. Each module represents a small, functional block of a complex board design that is more manageable for the designer, and they can be developed and tested independently before being integrated into the PCB layout.

Modular design increases the maturity of the whole organization. Over time, teams using modular design methods will be able to reuse modules across multiple designs, spend less time on testing and rework, make upgrades to modules more easily, create better designs, and accelerate the overall design process.

As board design increasingly becomes a team sport, I encourage you to continuously hone your skills to design for the reality of manufacturing and work hard to develop best practices for the process.

Read Matt’s book, The Printed Circuit Designer’s Guide to… Designing for Reality, or listen to his podcast here.

This column originally appeared in the June 2025 issue of Design0007 Magazine.