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There are six main reasons to pcb board prototype:
1. Fail early and inexpensively:Real innovation always includes a risk of failure. By building a prototype, you can quickly weed pcb board out the approaches that don’t work to focus on the ones that do.
2. Gather more accurate requirements: Almost half of all pcb board project costs are attributed to rework due to inadequate requirements. By developing a working prototype, you can demonstrate the functionality to help solidify requirements for the final design.
3. Technically understand the problem: By developing a functional prototype, you can address both the foreseen and the unforeseen technical challenges of a device’s design. You can then apply those solutions to a more elegant system pcb board design when you move to the final deployed solution.
4. Resolve conflicts: By taking advantage of a prototyping platform, you can quickly conduct several different implementations of the feature and benchmark the resulting performance to analyze the trade-offs of each approach. This can save time, but it also ensures that you make the correct design decisions pcb board.
5. Rally financial support: By developing a prototype to demonstrate the feasibility of your idea, you lower the risk of investment and therefore increase the probability that your idea will be funded.
6. File patents more easily pcb board: Though no longer required, a prototype is still the best and safest way to demonstrate “reduction to practice.” Furthermore, key components of a patent application, such as patent drawings and the inventor’s logbook.

PCB Design Flow - Step 1 - Part Research & Selection
Before even designing, the engineer needs to be able to select components that will make a circuit function. There are a pcb board number of semiconductor manufacturers including Analog Devices, National Semiconductor, NXP, Rohm, Linear Tech, On Semi and Texas Instruments, that create devices that meet varying specifications. There are a number of ways for engineers to research parts including:
Datasheets on semiconductor performance （many can be pcb board found at datasheetcatalog.com）
Manufacturer web content; Analog Devices makes a number of their products available for evaluation through online tools like ADISimOpAmp.
Simulation tools that can be downloaded and used to evaluate components from that manufacturer.

PCB Design Flow - Step 2 - Schematic Capture
Schematic capture involves taking symbolic representations pcb board of components (resistors, capacitors, amplifiers, comparators etc…) and wiring them together into a visual diagram which can be easily viewed to understand the functionality of the circuit. The purpose of the schematic is to view the building blocks of the circuit from a theoretical perspective pcb board.
The schematic consists of component symbols and wires (also called nets).

PCB Design Flow - Step 2b - Simulation
SPICE Simulation is the industry standard in simulation of circuit components. Simulation can be used to evaluate the behavior of real world components in a virtual environment, thereby allowing you to do advanced analysis of a design earlier in the pcb board design flow. By visualizing the behavior of the circuit at the earliest stage of prototyping, one can reduce errors and improve performance. Engineers often build the schematic of their design, and then simulate and visualize its characteristics.
Along with SPICE there are other languages and parameters which simulate circuits, including PSpice and HSpice.

PCB Design Flow - Step 3 - Board Layout
A schematic when completed is transferred to pcb board layout. Each symbol in a schematic is associated with a landpattern. A landpattern visually represents the physical dimensions of an IC or semiconductor package. The landpattern translates the symbol of a component (such as an Operational Amplifier) to an 8 pin rectangular package. During the pcb board layout stage the design is defined as it will eventually look when prototyped. This means defining the pcb board outline, placing parts, creating connections between parts in copper, and then finally exporting for fabrication.

PCB Design Flow - Step 4 - Verification & Validation
Once the board is fabricated, the engineer needs to validate the behavior of the pcb board prototype. Once it is validated, it can be handed off to product development and be prepared for manufacturing. Validation requires taking measurements from the board and ensuring that real performance meets the simulated performance (or specifications).