4 Common Mistakes that are Made on Printed Circuit Board Layout

Advancing technology has impacted our lives in different ways and printed circuit boards helps engineers to design portable and small electrical devices that make life much easier. There are many PCB manufacturing companies in existence today that produce high quality printed circuit boards for electrical device manufacturers. Here are the common PCB mistakes that occur during product design phase.

Incorrectly Situated Decoupling Capacitors

Critical components need a stable and clean voltage source. Decoupling capacitors are located on power supply rail that helps in this regard. To ensure optimum performance of decoupling capacitors, you must ensure they are close to the pin that needs the stable voltage. The power line that comes from the power source that requires routing goes to the decoupling capacitor before they go to the pin that needs a stable voltage. Additionally, it is important to place your output capacitor for power supply regulator very close to the output pin of your regulator. This is crucial for optimizing stability and improving transient response.

Wireless Antenna Layout Not Optimum

The China PCB layout of your antenna is crucial, especially if you have any wireless functionality. To ensure maximum transfer of power between the antenna and transceiver, their impedance should be matched. This means that you need a proper microstrip that connects the transceiver and the antenna. You should also have some kind of LC matching circuit such as pi-network that allows fine tuning of the antenna impedance to guarantee maximum power transfer and optimum matching.

Inappropriate Landing Patterns

PCB Design Software comes with libraries of common electronic components. These libraries incorporate both the PCB landing pattern and schematic symbol. Your designs will be good if you use the components included in the libraries and problems will start when you include components not provided in the libraries. Therefore, you need to manually draft your PCB landing pattern and schematic symbol. Making PCB manufacturing mistakes can be quite easy whenever you are drawing your landing pattern, for example, getting your pin-pin spacing wrong by even a millimeter will make it difficult to solder that part on the circuit board.

Non Manufacturable Buried or Blind Vias

A normal through via will go through layers of the printed circuit board. This simply means that even if you want to connect the trace from one layer to another all these layers will also have the same via. This can help in increasing the board size since the vias lower the routing space on layers that not even using the via. A blind via will connect the external layer to internal layer while a buried via will connect two internal layers but they have restrictions when it comes to their use. It is very easy to utilize buried or blind vias that cannot be manufactured.

Whether you are the one doing the designs or paying for the design, you need to know these common mistakes that are made on China PCB boards. You can avoid all these by opting to go for prototyping before your mass production. This will help you detect any mistakes beforehand and it will pay itself many times over. Furthermore, you can test the printed circuit boards on the electrical devices you are manufacturing.