November

CDR at end of month, beginning of December

• Congrats for making it through PDR! Hopefully, your mentor, judges, and sponsor have given you useful feedback on your schematic and what you need to make it successful.
  • Any feedback you feel was good you should implement. Anything you felt was useless or damaging to your project, don't implement. Again, talk to your mentor or any experts they know.
• It is best to have your PCB Layout in Altium ready to go by CDR.
• At this point, you should be shopping for board houses.
  • Board houses are places that can manufacture or even assemble your board. Let's focus on manufacturing for now.
    • Each board house will have a "capabilities" tab describing what they can fabricate
      • I would recommend looking at JLCPCB (China) and Advanced Circuits (US) to start. Different people will have different opinions on where to buy boards. Talk to people in IEEE and talk to your mentor and sponsor on where to shop for boards.
      • Once you pick where you're going to manufacture, make sure to implement these capabilities into the board setup portion of Altium while laying out. This way Altium can prevent you from creating things that would be impossible to manufacture.
        
        
• Things to keep in mind during layout
  • If you require certain capabilities on your board (microvias, impedance control, heavier copper, etc), you may have to pick a different board house as you're laying out your circuit
  • Datasheets often have recommended layouts you can use for your components. These are ultimately just guidelines but do your best to follow them.
  • Laying out a board onto a PCB is less a science and more an art. There are a lot of opinions on how to lay out a board and what you need to do for your specific application.
    • Again, Ask. For. Help. Talk to your sponsor and mentor on what you need to do. Also remember the Application Engineers from earlier.

Notes: Do not trust footprints downloaded from the internet, even if they're from the manufacturer. Look at the component datasheet for what package it uses, and find that stock package in Altium and map it to your schematic symbol.

Make sure you validate your layout with someone experienced, especially if it's your first time laying out your circuit. Talk to your sponsor or mentor.

• Here's a helpful resource on how to lay out boards:
  • It is a little old but the ideas are very much still applicable today