PRINTED CIRCUIT BOARDS (PCB) DESIGN AND FABRICATING GUIDE

Download Free Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) Design and Fabricating Guide.pdf This guide was originally developed to help 4th year undergraduate students complete their design project. The guidelines should also be helpful to all undergraduate and graduate students who wish to design and fabricate a single-side or double-side printed circuit board (PCB). With traditional DIP packages being replaced by fine-pitch surface mount alternatives, making a circuit “by hand” may not be practical in many cases. Making a two-sided PCB in the ECE Design Centre facility provides students with a rapid, low-cost alternative to using third-party PCB fabrication services.

The term “Printed Circuit Board” (PCB) has been loosely used to describe boards fabricated using a variety of methods. The most common method of commercially manufacturing high-quality PCBs relies on a photolithographic process, whereby the undesired copper is chemically etched away from the copper substrate. The regions to be etched are defined optically using a photolithographic mask, which explains why traditional PCBs are considered to be “printed”. Alternatively, simple PCBs can also be made by removing the unwanted copper using a purely mechanical process known as milling. In a milled PCB, a milling machine is used to remove the unwanted copper from a bare copper substrate to form the desired traces. Note that the resulting boards are still referred to as PCBs despite the fact that they are not “printed”. A sample milled PCB that has been removed from the original copper board is shown in Figure 1

The high-level design-flow for the milled PCB fabrication covered in this document is shown in Figure 2. Numerous CAD design packages are available. The process involves three separate software packages. The CAD flow will be described in detail in the following sections. After careful consideration Eagle PCB was selected for this guide

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