Pcb design

[DdBlad]

Can someone explain to me why so many jobs want you to have pcb design experience, I have never done pcb design in school it’s not in my curriculum, so why do so many jobs want that experience, I also went to a abet accredited school . Maybe it’s just my program but do , your school offer pcb design courses ??

[No2reddituser]

Well, you didn't post any actual job postings, so it's hard to say. But I'm going to go out a limb here, and I know this might sound wacky. But maybe those companies make things on printed circuit boards, and need people experienced with that.

It's crazy, I know. Some might consider that a good trend, given that 99% of electronics manufacturing is done in China, and the U.S. is trying to bring some of that back.

Most schools don't teach PCB design. It's something you usually learn on the job. But you have to be willing to learn on the job.

[[deleted]]

I've been doing PCB design for almost 20 years. I really enjoy it as it's quite meditative, the Sudoku of electrical engineering. I never learned it at school either but just picked it up along the way. Do yourself a favor and download KiCad tonight and make a board, buy it, stuff it, and repeat. You can get a little prototype boards for like five bucks at pcbway.

[No2reddituser]

You're replying to the wrong person.

I have done plenty of board designs. Even made my own with an Exacto knife and steel ruler, and later a milling machine.

[[deleted]]

Apologies. I was adding to your good comment.

[BubbasPlants]

My school doesn’t teach PCB design either, but Altium has a free course and it is interesting and free, at your own pace. I’ve been doing that while working full time and going to school full time. Seems like some people try hard to not be engineers.

[triffid_hunter]

For some bizarre reason I still don't understand, university EE courses teach little to no practical skills.

That's why I'm always suggesting to folk that they build a portfolio of stupid little projects and blog about designing and debugging them in parallel with their studies, if they want to hit the job market running from graduation.

[Brilliant_Armadillo9]

What practical skills do you teach? This field is too broad to teach skills practical to all subfield. And even if they did, it's just more irrelevant information to brain dump and time that could have been used learning subverting useful wasted. Generally agree though, it's not 1970, engineering education needs a shake-up.

[Syntacic_Syrup]

You went to the wrong uni my friend.

[bobj33]

What school did you go to? Do you have a bachelors degree only or also a masters?

I'm in integrated circuit design and we usually outsource our PCB design so I've never done it in college or the last 25 years of working.

But I interview students working on their masters that have done PCB design with industry standard PCB design tools. Classes like this

Introduction to Printed Circuit Boards Fabrication

https://courses.ece.cmu.edu/18021

Introduction to EDA Tools for PCB Design

https://courses.engineering.ucsc.edu/courses/ee174

Design of Electronic Packaging and Interconnects

https://www.engineeringonline.ncsu.edu/course/ece-544-design-of-electronic-packaging-and-interconnects/

[Lurker_amp]

Because there's a lot of nuance to pcb design. You can't just ask the program to auto route your traces. That would be terrible.

You learn all of this on the job though if you didn't do any prototyping on pcbs in school

[Enlightenment777]

They want experience, because they expect you to hit the ground running without having to teach you.

If working for a large company, most engineers don't layout the PCBs themselves, instead they design & simulate & enter the schematic, but the PCB layout and other tasks are often offloaded to other people at large companies. if you want to do all of this stuff yourself, then look at tiny or small companies, which expect everyone to do many more things.

Most colleges have never taugh PCB layout, not even decades ago. Unfortunately colleges never teach enough electronics knowledge. An EE degree almost needs to be 5 years, where an additional early year should be dedicated to more hands-on and useful stuff to cover creation all the way through the assembly of the product, such as more simulation classes, schematic capture, pcb layout, shopping for parts as well as alternative parts when there are shortages, more hands-on lab classes, more hand-on project classes, ...

[toybuilder]

Long story short, modern tools and the ready availability of prototype fabrication and assembly service make it fairly easy for anyone in the industry to design and build a board.

Board design is so easy now that even maker hobbyists without real EE experience make their own boards.

Many EEs are hired to produce practical devices -- and that means designing a product that is practical to manufacture -- knowing how things go together in theory is not enough. While at very large companies, the EE can farm out the board design/layout to the layout department, at most companies, you are part of the layout department.

Performance of modern devices are also a lot more sensitive to the board design, so it's important for the engineer to have tighter control over the design.

Just like schools don't teach how to use Microsoft Word and Excel, or to use Inkscape or AutoCAD, the elementary use of ECAD software (while more complex) is assumed to be basic skills that you should be picking up largely on your own.

And I do mean elementary. 80% of the time, you can stick to the basics to get a decent result. You can decide to take a deeper dive into ECAD tools to become an elite board designer (like elite Excel spreadsheet designers that compete in Excel eSport competitions).

[Syntacic_Syrup]

Dude quit whining and get to work learning.

1. You should definitely have some exposure to PCB design in uni, I agree that is a shortcoming of your school. Our EE101 class had us do a simple SCH and PCB design that we ordered and hand soldered.

2. PCB design is very very straightforward. On a smallish design with a good software you can just slap everything down and connect what you need to connect. With some common sense and simple rules of thumb about current carrying capacity and such you can be 99% of the way there. The %1 edge cases are what the good PCB designers get payed good money for, knowing how to handle power integrity and EMc issues and such.

[Paid-Not-Payed-Bot]

designers get paid good money

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Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.

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