PCB Design

The Dayford design team covers all today’s disciplines and technologies.

Whether it’s high-speed digital, analogue, RF or Power Electronics or a combination of all, we have the expertise. Whether the boards are rigid, flex, or rigid-flex and HDI, we have the expertise.

Services

• Library Management
• Schematics/Bill of Materials
• Layout
• Manufacturing/Assembly drawings
• Reverse engineering
• CAD transfers

CAD systems

• Altium Designer
• Cadence Allegro
• Cadence OrCAD Designer
• Mentor Expedition
• Mentor PADS
• Mentor Hyperlynx
• Mentor vSure
• Zuken CADStar

Response

With strength in depth and a comprehensive database of self-employed designers to call on, we are able to respond quickly to meet demanding timescales and to handle multiple board projects. If necessary, our designers will travel to customer site with CAD system for critical placement/routing

Critical Parameters

To control the effects of increasingly faster edge rates and clock speeds, critical parameters such as layer stack-up, laminate Er, trace width/space, copper thickness, dielectric thickness, delays, impedance etc are calculated using reliable field solvers and discussed with PCB Manufacturers at the beginning of a project to establish the most appropriate/cost-effective structure. The resultant constraints are then input prior to starting the layout process.

Power consumption, high current, high voltage, creepage/clearance and heat dissipation are also considered up-front and appropriate constraints applied

With many of our designs ending up in high volume production, parameters for cost-effective manufacture, assembly and test are built into the layout process from the start.

For signal simulation and analysis, we use Mentor’s Hyperlynx Signal Integrity tools. Potential problems can be predicted and eliminated early on using pre-layout simulation and analysis performed at component placement, critical routing and design completion stages.

Quality

IPC standards are worked to throughout. The company philosophy is to design for cost-effective manufacture, assembly and test with High Reliability in mind

A number of checks are employed during layout to avoid errors and misinterpretation using internal and/or customer provided check lists for component library data, layout and documentation.

Mentor’s vSure software is used for final manufacturing data verification using the original CAD files. Whilst Extended Gerber is still a widely used data output format , ODB++ is preferred by major CEM’s since it is intelligent and contains all the necessary data for manufacture, assembly and test.

We are a great believer in the up-front involvement of all parties in the supply chain for best results.