& Construction

Integrated BIM tools, including Revit, AutoCAD, and Civil 3D
& Manufacturing

Professional CAD/CAM tools built on Inventor and AutoCAD
Integrated BIM tools, including Revit, AutoCAD, and Civil 3D
Professional CAD/CAM tools built on Inventor and AutoCAD
After completing this video, you'll be able to:
Any referenced datasets can be downloaded from "Module downloads" in the module overview.
Transcript
00:01
Create an electronics layout.
00:04
After completing this video, you'll be able to
00:07
create a new PC B place PC B components to find a ground plane po
00:12
auto route, air wires and review manufacturing constraints
00:17
in fusion. We want to carry on with our PC B module schematic from the previous video.
00:22
Now that we've developed a schematic, we can push it to a PC B.
00:27
Now, the way that we do this is by selecting a switch to PC B document,
00:31
even though we haven't created one yet.
00:33
It'll take all the information that we've placed here and
00:36
it'll push that into a new PC B document.
00:39
The new PC B document will start out with all of the
00:41
components on the left hand side and a large PC B area.
00:46
We're going to begin by minimizing the inspector for now
00:49
and we're going to drag the top of the board down
00:52
and the far right side of the board over.
00:55
And we don't necessarily know how big we need the board.
00:58
So we're just going to estimate to give us a little bit better working area.
01:01
We can always resize this and note that we can bring
01:04
a PC B shape from a two D sketch inside of fusion
01:07
using a closed profile designed Infusions design workspace
01:11
is a helpful way to make sure that
01:13
your bolt hole locations and the overall shape
01:15
of your board matches your design intent.
01:18
Before we get too far into designing our board.
01:21
Let's take a look at some of the options that we have when we're working on A two DPC B
01:26
first off.
01:27
When we take a look at our layers, we have what's called our layer stack manager.
01:31
Now, by default, our layers will be listed here in the top section.
01:35
We have a top side of a board and a bottom side of our board
01:38
and then various other portions of our PC B
01:41
are going to be placed on different layers.
01:43
Things like our silk screen information will be on silk screen top layer 21.
01:48
But if we take a look at the layer stack manager,
01:51
this will give us information about some default settings.
01:54
Now, if you're working on a hobby license of fusion,
01:56
you will be limited to a two layer stack.
01:59
But if you're using a commercial or edu license,
02:01
then you are able to build different stack setups
02:04
and you can use some of these default settings.
02:07
We're not gonna be changing any of these settings. We simply want to identify them.
02:11
Notice that some of the default values for things like clearance between signals,
02:15
we have our information about distance between
02:18
the copper board outline and drill holes.
02:20
We've got various sizes differences for annular rings between layers.
02:25
We've got different shapes, supplies, masks and some miscellaneous sections.
02:30
So if you're working on more complex boards
02:32
coming into your layer stack manager and making
02:34
sure it's set up properly is going to be the first step in your process.
02:38
We're going to select OK to use all of our default settings in this case.
02:43
The next thing that we want to do is we want to make sure
02:45
that we take a look at all of the various components that we have
02:49
right now. There are a lot of things that need to be placed on the board
02:52
and they're not necessarily in the correct orientation.
02:55
So as we bring them on to our PC B,
02:58
you'll notice that they do snap into some specific locations.
03:02
And that's because there are rules in place that
03:05
prevent them from placing things like through holes or VIAS
03:08
right on the edge of a board.
03:10
Now, those rules can be found in the rules in DRC section
03:14
and notice that when we go into our DRC section,
03:17
we can see information about things like the class and
03:20
all the stuff that we saw in our stack manager.
03:23
There are also options at the bottom for things like what
03:26
happens when we have violations to some of those rules.
03:30
It's gonna push those via
03:31
into the center of the board.
03:33
Now, some information such as the silk screen area
03:36
doesn't really matter if it goes off the edge of the board in terms of manufacture.
03:40
But it's certainly important that we make sure that all of
03:43
our VIAS or holes are going to be inside of the board.
03:46
The next thing that we want to note is we have
03:48
pin one here and pin four here listed as ground.
03:53
But when we look at pin one,
03:54
it's not listed as 12 volts. It's listed as N dollar sign eight.
03:59
If we take a look at our other connector and we zoom in,
04:02
we can see this one is listed as 12 volts.
04:05
And that's because this is our input side
04:07
and the other connector here is gonna be our output side.
04:10
We're sending five volts over to this specific pin.
04:15
So what we want to do is make sure that we drag this to the right side of our board
04:19
and that we rotate it.
04:21
When we take a look at our modified tools, rotate is an option that we can use.
04:25
And every time we left click, it'll rotate that component.
04:28
I want to make sure that pin one is listed on the top
04:32
and then we'll select done and then move it over to the right side of our board.
04:37
If we need to move any of our notes,
04:38
we can simply find their center position and we can drag them to a new location.
04:43
Some of this information will be listed on a specific layer
04:47
that will not get created inside of our printed circuit board.
04:50
For example, J one is on layer 25 and this one here is on layer 27
04:56
depending on our settings. When we go to manufacture
04:58
J one will be on the board.
05:00
But this information here about the part number of our connector will not,
05:04
let's go ahead and move J two on.
05:07
And once again, we want to make sure that we rotate it.
05:10
We want to make sure that our 12 volt P is at the top
05:14
and then we'll drag this off to the left hand side.
05:17
Once again,
05:18
it will not allow us to push to a situation where the through holes
05:22
are on the edge or too close to the edge of our board.
05:25
Next, I'm gonna bring the to 220
05:28
notice that it doesn't fit on the board.
05:30
So this already tells me that I likely need to increase the size of our board
05:33
just to give everything a little bit more space,
05:36
gonna go ahead and place this in the upper left hand corner in case we need to heat,
05:40
sink it to something in a housing.
05:42
The next thing that we want to do is begin to place all of our other components.
05:46
I'm gonna take Q one which is our first NPN transistor.
05:51
I'm gonna place it here and we'll take Q two and place it next to it.
05:55
Once again, Q one and Q two will be on our silkscreen layer but the NPN will not.
06:01
So for right now, I'm not worried that it overlaps other information.
06:05
The next thing that we wanna do is figure out
06:07
which other components we need to fit on our board.
06:09
We have a lot of resistors here and I wanna make sure
06:12
that they're stacked and oriented in a way that makes sense.
06:15
So I'm gonna take this resistor, I'm gonna rotate it by left clicking
06:19
and I'm gonna do the same thing for all of the other resistors.
06:22
I'm gonna make sure they're,
06:23
they're in this orientation and they'll be easier for me to place on the board.
06:27
So
06:27
starting with R one, I'm gonna place it up here in the right hand side
06:31
and then I'm gonna put R two next to it.
06:34
We're going to put R three
06:37
and notice that we're beginning to run out of room
06:39
once again. If we need to resize our board, that's perfectly fine.
06:42
We can expand it and make it a little bit wider on the right hand side,
06:46
moving this connector over as well.
06:49
Next, I'm gonna take R four
06:52
and are five.
06:55
When we're building our PC B, we do have some standard grid settings as well.
06:59
If we go to view, we can see where we're snapping to
07:02
and we can use some various settings for our snaps, for example,
07:06
setting it to millimeters
07:08
and taking a look at our settings
07:10
currently, it's set to 1.27.
07:13
You can set this a bit higher to 2.54 or use whatever
07:16
setting you need to when you're setting up your own circuit board.
07:19
But now that we've got everything placed, we need to add the led,
07:23
which is a fairly large component.
07:24
I'm gonna try to stick it somewhere in the middle of
07:26
the board to make sure that I have enough room.
07:29
I want to do just a little bit of clean up before we move on.
07:32
So I'm going to select all of the resistors by holding down shift.
07:36
And then I want to use some mo
07:37
modify tools to align them
07:39
with our align tools. We have a couple of options,
07:42
notice that we can align center vertically and horizontally.
07:46
We can align them by centers.
07:48
We can also space them out evenly across their selection.
07:51
So using some of these options to distribute them horizontally and make
07:55
sure that their centers are aligned is certainly going to help.
07:58
Remember that the values for things like R one
08:00
are gonna come through in our silk screen.
08:02
But the one K, the 120 the 4.7 will not show with our default settings.
08:08
If we need to reposition these again,
08:10
we can simply manually move them down to a new location
08:13
and they'll behave using those snap points for wherever their new location will be.
08:19
Now that everything is on the board my next
08:21
step is to create what's called a polygon pour.
08:24
Now, polygon pores are not strictly required,
08:27
but adding a polygon pour from the outline can be a great
08:30
way to create a common ground or power plan on your board.
08:33
We're gonna select polygon pour and select one of the edges of our board.
08:37
And then we're going to place this on our top layer.
08:40
Once we place it on our top layer,
08:42
it will also respect all of our design rule settings
08:45
for distance away from the edge of our board.
08:48
The next thing that we want to do is select the edge of our polygon pore.
08:52
And in this case, it's not going to be inset, it's going to be this red outline.
08:57
On the far side,
08:58
we're going to select it and we want to go to our inspector.
09:01
So once we select the edge of our polygon,
09:04
we want to make sure that we scroll down to its name,
09:07
we're going to give it the name GND for ground.
09:10
You'll notice that it pops up in a list,
09:12
we'll select this and then we're going to set the name of our polygon pour to ground.
09:18
We're going to assign that by saying yes.
09:20
Now the reason that this is important is because any of
09:23
our components pins that are grounded will now go directly to our
09:27
ground plane rather than requiring us to run a trace or an
09:31
air wire to connect them to the rest of the board.
09:33
This prevents us from running traces from all of our
09:36
components to a common ground pin on one component.
09:40
Because our voltage regulator, as well as our NPN transistors
09:45
and pins on our JST connectors are all directly grounded.
09:48
This simplifies the traces that are needed.
09:52
The next step in our process is to run all the traces.
09:55
Currently, we see what are called air wires.
09:57
Now, the air wires are placeholders for where the traces need to go
10:01
under our route menu.
10:03
You can see that we've got some options to manually route our board.
10:06
But under quick route, there's an option to do an auto
10:09
router
10:10
using the auto router allows us to use some
10:13
options for the amount of effort we need placed
10:16
and the number of threads that we want currently running,
10:19
this is essentially the amount of effort that we want to put into getting a solution.
10:23
What we're gonna do is use continue
10:26
and we're gonna select start and watch it go through and create some variations.
10:31
What we can do once we have some variations is note that some of them have zero VIAS
10:36
while some of them have one via.
10:38
Now, what this means when we have a via,
10:40
this is going to be a location where we need to push through
10:44
the board and take a trace from say the top to the bottom.
10:48
Now, if we can avoid a via, this is going to be an ideal situation.
10:51
So picking one of the options that has zero VIAS
10:54
is going to be a better solution for us.
10:56
We're gonna go ahead and take optimized for the
10:59
first variation here that has the top router selection.
11:03
And we're going to select and job.
11:05
Now, what this does is it's going to take
11:08
material away from our polygon poor or our ground plane
11:12
leaving the appropriate gap and running the traces in the center
11:17
because we also have some blue lines, those are shown on the bottom of the board,
11:21
we can switch our layer to bottom to see where those traces are.
11:24
To make it a little bit easier to identify where everything is routing.
11:28
Note that some of these traces will go through the center of other components,
11:32
which is perfectly fine.
11:33
As long as we respect all of the rules of our board,
11:36
remember that blue is going to be on the bottom side and the red is on the top side.
11:41
So while this looks like it's cutting through the corner of that polygon pour,
11:45
it's actually on the opposite side of the board.
11:47
And it's not a problem,
11:48
you can also note that when you zoom in, you can see the names of those traces.
11:52
So if you took the time to rename anything,
11:55
you should be able to see those values there such as G and D for ground.
11:60
And if we find one that has 12 volts,
12:03
we'll be able to see that the trace lists 12 volts here.
12:07
So far,
12:08
everything that we've done has created a printed circuit
12:11
board with all the components from our schematic.
12:14
We want to make sure that we save this new printed circuit board in this case.
12:18
Instead of calling it the PC B module schematic,
12:20
we're going to call it the board layout at
12:23
this point.
12:24
Make sure that everything that you've done has saved in the
12:26
next video we will be talking about creating our 3D board,
12:30
going through our design rule checks and making sure that we can make
12:33
some of the manufacturing files required to get quotes on this board.
Video transcript
00:01
Create an electronics layout.
00:04
After completing this video, you'll be able to
00:07
create a new PC B place PC B components to find a ground plane po
00:12
auto route, air wires and review manufacturing constraints
00:17
in fusion. We want to carry on with our PC B module schematic from the previous video.
00:22
Now that we've developed a schematic, we can push it to a PC B.
00:27
Now, the way that we do this is by selecting a switch to PC B document,
00:31
even though we haven't created one yet.
00:33
It'll take all the information that we've placed here and
00:36
it'll push that into a new PC B document.
00:39
The new PC B document will start out with all of the
00:41
components on the left hand side and a large PC B area.
00:46
We're going to begin by minimizing the inspector for now
00:49
and we're going to drag the top of the board down
00:52
and the far right side of the board over.
00:55
And we don't necessarily know how big we need the board.
00:58
So we're just going to estimate to give us a little bit better working area.
01:01
We can always resize this and note that we can bring
01:04
a PC B shape from a two D sketch inside of fusion
01:07
using a closed profile designed Infusions design workspace
01:11
is a helpful way to make sure that
01:13
your bolt hole locations and the overall shape
01:15
of your board matches your design intent.
01:18
Before we get too far into designing our board.
01:21
Let's take a look at some of the options that we have when we're working on A two DPC B
01:26
first off.
01:27
When we take a look at our layers, we have what's called our layer stack manager.
01:31
Now, by default, our layers will be listed here in the top section.
01:35
We have a top side of a board and a bottom side of our board
01:38
and then various other portions of our PC B
01:41
are going to be placed on different layers.
01:43
Things like our silk screen information will be on silk screen top layer 21.
01:48
But if we take a look at the layer stack manager,
01:51
this will give us information about some default settings.
01:54
Now, if you're working on a hobby license of fusion,
01:56
you will be limited to a two layer stack.
01:59
But if you're using a commercial or edu license,
02:01
then you are able to build different stack setups
02:04
and you can use some of these default settings.
02:07
We're not gonna be changing any of these settings. We simply want to identify them.
02:11
Notice that some of the default values for things like clearance between signals,
02:15
we have our information about distance between
02:18
the copper board outline and drill holes.
02:20
We've got various sizes differences for annular rings between layers.
02:25
We've got different shapes, supplies, masks and some miscellaneous sections.
02:30
So if you're working on more complex boards
02:32
coming into your layer stack manager and making
02:34
sure it's set up properly is going to be the first step in your process.
02:38
We're going to select OK to use all of our default settings in this case.
02:43
The next thing that we want to do is we want to make sure
02:45
that we take a look at all of the various components that we have
02:49
right now. There are a lot of things that need to be placed on the board
02:52
and they're not necessarily in the correct orientation.
02:55
So as we bring them on to our PC B,
02:58
you'll notice that they do snap into some specific locations.
03:02
And that's because there are rules in place that
03:05
prevent them from placing things like through holes or VIAS
03:08
right on the edge of a board.
03:10
Now, those rules can be found in the rules in DRC section
03:14
and notice that when we go into our DRC section,
03:17
we can see information about things like the class and
03:20
all the stuff that we saw in our stack manager.
03:23
There are also options at the bottom for things like what
03:26
happens when we have violations to some of those rules.
03:30
It's gonna push those via
03:31
into the center of the board.
03:33
Now, some information such as the silk screen area
03:36
doesn't really matter if it goes off the edge of the board in terms of manufacture.
03:40
But it's certainly important that we make sure that all of
03:43
our VIAS or holes are going to be inside of the board.
03:46
The next thing that we want to note is we have
03:48
pin one here and pin four here listed as ground.
03:53
But when we look at pin one,
03:54
it's not listed as 12 volts. It's listed as N dollar sign eight.
03:59
If we take a look at our other connector and we zoom in,
04:02
we can see this one is listed as 12 volts.
04:05
And that's because this is our input side
04:07
and the other connector here is gonna be our output side.
04:10
We're sending five volts over to this specific pin.
04:15
So what we want to do is make sure that we drag this to the right side of our board
04:19
and that we rotate it.
04:21
When we take a look at our modified tools, rotate is an option that we can use.
04:25
And every time we left click, it'll rotate that component.
04:28
I want to make sure that pin one is listed on the top
04:32
and then we'll select done and then move it over to the right side of our board.
04:37
If we need to move any of our notes,
04:38
we can simply find their center position and we can drag them to a new location.
04:43
Some of this information will be listed on a specific layer
04:47
that will not get created inside of our printed circuit board.
04:50
For example, J one is on layer 25 and this one here is on layer 27
04:56
depending on our settings. When we go to manufacture
04:58
J one will be on the board.
05:00
But this information here about the part number of our connector will not,
05:04
let's go ahead and move J two on.
05:07
And once again, we want to make sure that we rotate it.
05:10
We want to make sure that our 12 volt P is at the top
05:14
and then we'll drag this off to the left hand side.
05:17
Once again,
05:18
it will not allow us to push to a situation where the through holes
05:22
are on the edge or too close to the edge of our board.
05:25
Next, I'm gonna bring the to 220
05:28
notice that it doesn't fit on the board.
05:30
So this already tells me that I likely need to increase the size of our board
05:33
just to give everything a little bit more space,
05:36
gonna go ahead and place this in the upper left hand corner in case we need to heat,
05:40
sink it to something in a housing.
05:42
The next thing that we want to do is begin to place all of our other components.
05:46
I'm gonna take Q one which is our first NPN transistor.
05:51
I'm gonna place it here and we'll take Q two and place it next to it.
05:55
Once again, Q one and Q two will be on our silkscreen layer but the NPN will not.
06:01
So for right now, I'm not worried that it overlaps other information.
06:05
The next thing that we wanna do is figure out
06:07
which other components we need to fit on our board.
06:09
We have a lot of resistors here and I wanna make sure
06:12
that they're stacked and oriented in a way that makes sense.
06:15
So I'm gonna take this resistor, I'm gonna rotate it by left clicking
06:19
and I'm gonna do the same thing for all of the other resistors.
06:22
I'm gonna make sure they're,
06:23
they're in this orientation and they'll be easier for me to place on the board.
06:27
So
06:27
starting with R one, I'm gonna place it up here in the right hand side
06:31
and then I'm gonna put R two next to it.
06:34
We're going to put R three
06:37
and notice that we're beginning to run out of room
06:39
once again. If we need to resize our board, that's perfectly fine.
06:42
We can expand it and make it a little bit wider on the right hand side,
06:46
moving this connector over as well.
06:49
Next, I'm gonna take R four
06:52
and are five.
06:55
When we're building our PC B, we do have some standard grid settings as well.
06:59
If we go to view, we can see where we're snapping to
07:02
and we can use some various settings for our snaps, for example,
07:06
setting it to millimeters
07:08
and taking a look at our settings
07:10
currently, it's set to 1.27.
07:13
You can set this a bit higher to 2.54 or use whatever
07:16
setting you need to when you're setting up your own circuit board.
07:19
But now that we've got everything placed, we need to add the led,
07:23
which is a fairly large component.
07:24
I'm gonna try to stick it somewhere in the middle of
07:26
the board to make sure that I have enough room.
07:29
I want to do just a little bit of clean up before we move on.
07:32
So I'm going to select all of the resistors by holding down shift.
07:36
And then I want to use some mo
07:37
modify tools to align them
07:39
with our align tools. We have a couple of options,
07:42
notice that we can align center vertically and horizontally.
07:46
We can align them by centers.
07:48
We can also space them out evenly across their selection.
07:51
So using some of these options to distribute them horizontally and make
07:55
sure that their centers are aligned is certainly going to help.
07:58
Remember that the values for things like R one
08:00
are gonna come through in our silk screen.
08:02
But the one K, the 120 the 4.7 will not show with our default settings.
08:08
If we need to reposition these again,
08:10
we can simply manually move them down to a new location
08:13
and they'll behave using those snap points for wherever their new location will be.
08:19
Now that everything is on the board my next
08:21
step is to create what's called a polygon pour.
08:24
Now, polygon pores are not strictly required,
08:27
but adding a polygon pour from the outline can be a great
08:30
way to create a common ground or power plan on your board.
08:33
We're gonna select polygon pour and select one of the edges of our board.
08:37
And then we're going to place this on our top layer.
08:40
Once we place it on our top layer,
08:42
it will also respect all of our design rule settings
08:45
for distance away from the edge of our board.
08:48
The next thing that we want to do is select the edge of our polygon pore.
08:52
And in this case, it's not going to be inset, it's going to be this red outline.
08:57
On the far side,
08:58
we're going to select it and we want to go to our inspector.
09:01
So once we select the edge of our polygon,
09:04
we want to make sure that we scroll down to its name,
09:07
we're going to give it the name GND for ground.
09:10
You'll notice that it pops up in a list,
09:12
we'll select this and then we're going to set the name of our polygon pour to ground.
09:18
We're going to assign that by saying yes.
09:20
Now the reason that this is important is because any of
09:23
our components pins that are grounded will now go directly to our
09:27
ground plane rather than requiring us to run a trace or an
09:31
air wire to connect them to the rest of the board.
09:33
This prevents us from running traces from all of our
09:36
components to a common ground pin on one component.
09:40
Because our voltage regulator, as well as our NPN transistors
09:45
and pins on our JST connectors are all directly grounded.
09:48
This simplifies the traces that are needed.
09:52
The next step in our process is to run all the traces.
09:55
Currently, we see what are called air wires.
09:57
Now, the air wires are placeholders for where the traces need to go
10:01
under our route menu.
10:03
You can see that we've got some options to manually route our board.
10:06
But under quick route, there's an option to do an auto
10:09
router
10:10
using the auto router allows us to use some
10:13
options for the amount of effort we need placed
10:16
and the number of threads that we want currently running,
10:19
this is essentially the amount of effort that we want to put into getting a solution.
10:23
What we're gonna do is use continue
10:26
and we're gonna select start and watch it go through and create some variations.
10:31
What we can do once we have some variations is note that some of them have zero VIAS
10:36
while some of them have one via.
10:38
Now, what this means when we have a via,
10:40
this is going to be a location where we need to push through
10:44
the board and take a trace from say the top to the bottom.
10:48
Now, if we can avoid a via, this is going to be an ideal situation.
10:51
So picking one of the options that has zero VIAS
10:54
is going to be a better solution for us.
10:56
We're gonna go ahead and take optimized for the
10:59
first variation here that has the top router selection.
11:03
And we're going to select and job.
11:05
Now, what this does is it's going to take
11:08
material away from our polygon poor or our ground plane
11:12
leaving the appropriate gap and running the traces in the center
11:17
because we also have some blue lines, those are shown on the bottom of the board,
11:21
we can switch our layer to bottom to see where those traces are.
11:24
To make it a little bit easier to identify where everything is routing.
11:28
Note that some of these traces will go through the center of other components,
11:32
which is perfectly fine.
11:33
As long as we respect all of the rules of our board,
11:36
remember that blue is going to be on the bottom side and the red is on the top side.
11:41
So while this looks like it's cutting through the corner of that polygon pour,
11:45
it's actually on the opposite side of the board.
11:47
And it's not a problem,
11:48
you can also note that when you zoom in, you can see the names of those traces.
11:52
So if you took the time to rename anything,
11:55
you should be able to see those values there such as G and D for ground.
11:60
And if we find one that has 12 volts,
12:03
we'll be able to see that the trace lists 12 volts here.
12:07
So far,
12:08
everything that we've done has created a printed circuit
12:11
board with all the components from our schematic.
12:14
We want to make sure that we save this new printed circuit board in this case.
12:18
Instead of calling it the PC B module schematic,
12:20
we're going to call it the board layout at
12:23
this point.
12:24
Make sure that everything that you've done has saved in the
12:26
next video we will be talking about creating our 3D board,
12:30
going through our design rule checks and making sure that we can make
12:33
some of the manufacturing files required to get quotes on this board.
Step-by-step guide
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