PCB Design for Consumer Electronics

On the surface, consumer electronics can seem like the easiest market to design for. After all, it’s all about the next cool personal electronic gadget looking cool and working with the latest user interface, right? But if you’ve ever designed and released electronic products for consumers before, you know all too well how difficult it can really be. While keeping marketing and graphic design people happy with your design, you also have to figure out how to make sure this new product is going to pass regulatory requirements for safety, EMC, and environmental laws. At the same time, feature creep, last minute changes, and unavailable components can cause fatal delays to the product launch, leaving the market wide open for competitors.