Electronic Systems & PCB Design and Manufacturing
PCB design is approaching a new era of digital transformation. Digital technologies bring together all the aspects of product design, including mechanical and electrical, and streamline the entire PCB design process - from product inception through manufacturing.
Five pillars that enable digital transformation
To bring about digital transformation within PCB design, companies need to consider five key pillars.
Digitally integrated and optimized
Getting to market faster demands cross-domain integration between electronic PCB design,
mechanical, electrical, software, and manufacturing.
Engineering productivity and efficiency
With the complexity of today's PCBs, organizations need to be empowered with best-in-class toolsets to design faster, produce higher quality, and lower project risks.
Digital prototype driven verification
Shifting verification to the left in the PCB design flow using automated, integrated tools reduces product schedules and increases the likelihood of on-time product launches.
Model-based systems engineering
In a world where electronics connect everything, the ability to decompose, partition, reintegrate and verify systems gives organizations a head-start.
Supply chain resilience
Adapting and making strategic decisions in an ever-changing global sourcing environment is a winning formula.
PCB Design best practices
Digitally integrated and optimized
Establishing a digitally integrated solution across multiple domains reduces manual intervention, fosters collaboration, and improves transparency across disciplines.
With a digitally integrated and optimized multi-domain environment, all engineering teams, including IC, IC packaging, FPGA, and PCB design within electronics, as well as mechanical and software, can optimize the costs associated with a project, accelerate design time, manage data integrity, and improve the quality of results. The best practices that can enable a digitally integrated and optimized multi-domain environment include:
- ECAD/MCAD collaboration
- Design/Manufacturing
- Library and data management
Engineering productivity and efficiency
In general, the PCB design process is the same no matter the tool, the team, the company, or the culture. The differentiator is the manner of execution, where engineering productivity & efficiency play a significant role. This enables you to:
- Predictably and reliably manage complex and high-capacity designs.
- Utilize advanced interactive and automated design support to accelerate routine tasks.
- Design correct-by-construction with a constraint-driven process.
- Implement concurrent team design-driven cycle-time reduction.
The best practices that can enable engineering productivity and efficiency include:
- Design automation
- Analog/digital/RF
- Concurrent design
- Design reuse
- Constraint driven design
- Advanced design
Digital-prototype driven verification
While product and design complexity increases, associated tools and process complexity are also rising. By integrating verification throughout PCB design - starting very early, long before physical prototypes - engineering teams can smooth the entire electronic systems design process and increase design quality through digital-prototype driven, shift-left verification and cross-domain modeling.
Shift-left verification in the design flow eliminates the specialist bottleneck by using automated, integrated tools. Cost and time are saved by finding problems early, during design, minimizing design iterations, and manufacturing respins.
The best practices that can enable digital-prototype-driven verification include a shift-left approach to:
- Schematic analysis
- Thermal analysis
- SI/PI
- AMS
- Manufacturability
Model-based systems engineering
From system requirements to implementation and manufacturing, a model-based systems engineering approach allows team members to view the entire system (electronic, electrical, mechanical, and software) and model pieces of that system, defining and optimizing interconnectivity and traceability from one domain to the other.
The best practices that can enable system-level model-based engineering include:
- Multi-board
- Electrical/electronic
- FPGA/PCB optimization
- IC/Package/PCB
Supply chain resilience
Electronic systems design companies have always depended on a value chain of suppliers and manufacturing services to bring successful products to market. Connecting the demand for a product with the supply of its necessary parts has never been more complex than it is today. The answer is to design for supply chain resilience.
The best practices that can enable supply chain resilience include:
- BOM validation
- Best-known part availability
- Validation of alternates
Electronic systems design solutions
Ready to digitally transformation your electronic systems design? The Siemens portfolio is best positioned to deliver digitally integrated product ideation platforms so that you can create market-winning products.
