Bogatin’s Practical Guide to Prototype Breadboard and PCB Design

Printed circuit boards (PCB) are at the heart of every electronic product manufactured today. Yet, engineers rarely learn to design PCBs from a class or course. They learn it by doing, by reading app notes, watching YouTube videos, and sitting by the side of an experienced engineer.

This book is the foundation-building book for all engineers starting out to design PCBs. It teaches good habits in designing a PCB, first for connectivity, and secondly, introduces the four most important principles to reduce noise.

A seven-step process is presented: developing a plan of record, creating a Bill of Materials, completing the schematic, completing the layout, completing the assembly, conducting bring up and troubleshooting, and documenting the project. Each step is developed in detail. In particular, the emphasis in this book is on risk management: what can be done at each step of the process to reduce the risk of a hard error that requires a complete re-spin or a soft error that requires some sort of on-the-fly repair.

After connectivity is designed, it’s important to develop good habits to minimize the potential noise from ground bounce, power rail stitching noise, stack-up design, and switching noise in signal paths. These techniques apply to all designs from 2-layer to 8-layer and more for bandwidths below 200 MHz.

The best practices for manual lead-free soldering are presented so that everyone can become a soldering expert.

The best measurement practices using common lab instruments such as the DMM, the constant current/constant voltage power supply, and oscilloscopes are presented so that common artifacts are minimized. Features in the design that help you find design or assembly errors quickly and the troubleshooting techniques to find and fix problems are introduced.

Applying the habits presented in this book will help every engineer design their next circuit board faster, with less chance of an unexpected problem, and with the lowest noise. This textbook will also have embedded videos to visually demonstrate many of the hands-on processes introduced in this book.