Designing Without a Rulebook: When Engineering Becomes Innovation

Estimated reading time: 1 minute

What if the very rules that made you successful as a PCB designer are the ones now holding you back? This reminds me of walking the floor and attending sessions at both PCB West 2025 and APEX EXPO 2026, where one common theme stood out: More designs with traditional PCB “best practices” simply don’t apply. It’s not because they’re wrong, but because the problems we’re solving have fundamentally changed.

In some cases, those best practices can actually limit performance. This is where PCB design moves beyond optimization and into something far more challenging: designing without a rulebook.

When ‘Best Practices’ Stop Being Best

For most of our careers, PCB design has relied on proven guidelines, rules that ensure manufacturability, signal integrity, and reliability. These practices are built on decades of experience because they work.

But what happens when you’re working on something that hasn’t been done before? This could be designs for:

• Ultra-high-speed interconnects
• AI and HPC hardware pushing extreme bandwidths and power density
• Advanced packaging and heterogeneous integration
• Flexible and hybrid electronics

In these cases, the question shifts from “What’s the right way to do this?” to “Why was it ever done that way, and does it still apply here?” That’s a very different mindset and one that many teams are still learning how to navigate.

To continue reading this article, which appeared in the April 2026 I-Connect007 Magazine, click here.