Why Your PCB Design Review Process Is Obsolete and What You Can Do About It

A printed circuit board (PCB) design review is a practice to review the design of a board for possible errors and issues at various stages of product development. It can range from a formal checklist with official sign-offs to a more free-form inspection of schematic drawings and PCB layouts. Some companies do it completely in-house, while others get help from design firms and contractors. In many cases, they involve their contract manufacturers (CMs) early in the process to ensure manufacturability of the board. Our users concur that a design review helps catch mistakes early, decrease the number of board spins and manufacturing iterations, and consequently reduce product development costs and time to market.

While the benefits are obvious, due to the time pressure to get the board out, the design review process may be rushed and errors overlooked, resulting in faulty prototypes, board re-spins, and product delays.

The common methods used to conduct a design review with feedback captured on PDF printouts or via long email chains mean that more precious time can be spent on tracking down the feedback than on actually correcting issues. The shift to remote or hybrid work further complicates matters, as locking everyone into one room to conduct a design review, the preferred method in many companies, is seldom feasible.

For the purposes of this article, we will not delve into what to check during a design review process but rather look at how a review process itself usually unfolds and how to optimize it to get the most out of your time.

How Do Most Organizations Conduct PCB Design Reviews Today?

Here at Altium, we talk to hundreds of our users, and for many, a design review follows a similar scenario. They hold a formal meeting or a video call lasting from a few hours to a day to get every stakeholder to review the design. This process can be repeated at different stages of product development. They use several types of tools to capture, document, and track feedback:

Option 1: Paper and Red Pen

Here is how one of our users described it:

I just send people PDFs of schematics. The firmware guy might get printouts or PDFs of schematics and then redline it on paper. Then the design engineer would come in and make those changes. Maybe that paper gets lost. Maybe it goes to the recycling bin; maybe it gets scanned somewhere. And then the same happens in the design review. We print out the pieces and sit down at a table with the sheets. Everyone’s got a red pen, and they’re crossing off things, and you take that and it exists in your office. Maybe you scan it, and maybe you don't, but you incorporate the feedback into the design, but there’s no record of that incorporation having happened. Because it's all hard copies, it's very volatile, and it's subject to being lost.

Option 2: Screenshots and Email Chains

The feedback is captured in a screenshot with accompanying commentary. This feedback is then usually shared via email, sometimes messaging tools like Slack or Skype; some users even put it into PowerPoint slides. There are usually clarifying questions and status updates that need to be exchanged, and as a result, this method usually generates long and unwieldy email threads.

With contract manufacturers, we might send them Gerber files and then they're sending us back screenshots with Microsoft Paint written on them, saying “like this, and this, and this”. And that's living in your email and that subject to getting lost to never being found again.

Option 3: Jira and Other Project Management or Ticketing Systems

We’ll let another Altium customer describe it:

I intensively used Jira. I created tasks for every correction. For a recent project, I created 95 tasks in total! For every task, I needed to put a description, make a screenshot, and put some marks there. I use a two-screen configuration—on one I have Jira and on the second, Altium Designer.

Why Are These Methods Problematic?

When feedback is captured on paper or through long email chains with screenshots, it becomes laborious to consolidate it, to keep track of who provided it and what has been incorporated into the design. To keep everything under control, engineers have to waste time on a lot of administrative work. However, hours of busy work cannot guarantee an optimal outcome if you don’t improve the reliability of the process itself. Even the most thoroughly conducted design review can fail to prevent faulty prototypes from being produced simply because feedback can be missed or the wrong version sent to the contract manufacturer. When there is so much volatility in the process, mistakes can be overlooked in spite of best efforts.

Moreover, certain industries, medical devices (CFR 820.30, as an example), automotive and others, can be subject to additional scrutiny and regulations from government agencies in different jurisdictions, in which all communications, approvals, and changes to the design of a device must be documented and available for auditing. In such cases, tracking down feedback, changes, and approvals is no longer an option and can turn into a very time-consuming process.

What Is the Alternative?

In many domains, from manufacturing to software development, effective tools and methodologies have been developed to achieve reliability and agility of the process. While electronic devices have been at the forefront of transforming the world as we know it, the process of hardware development itself has been late to the party of digital transformation. We decided to change that with Altium Agile Teams, our electronics design platform, because you should be spending your time designing the technologies of tomorrow, not tracking down twenty different email chains. Now you can accelerate reviews, track feedback in real-time, and prevent errors for higher-quality products with design review capability.

Altium Agile Teams provides centralized cloud storage and version control for your designs and libraries. In a nutshell, you could say it is a GitHub for hardware that also helps you collaborate with your mechanical team, manufacturers, and other project stakeholders. Let's examine how running a PCB project through Altium Agile Teams compares to other methods.

1. One Source of Truth, Visibility, and Version Control

To start using Altium Agile Teams, you need to create a workspace and a centralized location for your design files, libraries, and collaboration. Once you have a workspace, you can connect to it directly from Altium Designer. After you upload your project to Altium, you can continue working in Altium Designer as you usually would. When you're satisfied with local changes, you can save your work to the server to make changes visible to others. Altium will start tracking the history of changes, and you will always be able to see who made an update and when, what was changed, and what version is the latest.

2. Real-Time Access from Any Device

Now that you have your project in Altium, you can share it with as many people as you want early in the design process. You have full control of who can see, edit, and download the files. As you commit updates to Altium, everyone will always see the latest version you saved to the server when they log into Altium. 

You can connect to the platform directly from the Altium Designer or log in through a web browser. Let's focus on the latter option—logging in via a web browser. What this means in practice is that once you share your project with specific people, they can open and view it from any device, including an iPad or phone, without the need to install Altium Designer.

3. In-Context Design Annotation and Markup

Interactive commenting in Altium Agile Teams allows you to attach comments to documents or specific objects in your design (available for schematic documents and 2D and 3D layout modes in PCB) and tag people to resolve issues. You can leave a comment either via the web browser or in Altium Designer; it will sync again and appear in both locations, always in the context of your design. 

What makes interactive commenting interactive is that you can provide feedback in the form of text and visually highlight an area or draw over the design. The drawing will be contained in the comment object and not appear on the actual schematic sheet or PCB document. Remember that you can open project files through a browser on an iPad or phone. Combined with the drawing capabilities, this offers some neat ways to provide and capture feedback.

One of our users shared the screenshot below, in which they replaced the red pen and paper with an iPad and stylus. They can still redline the design, but all markups are digital, stored in one central location, and visible to all project participants.

If you're wondering about the limitations of this functionality, one of our creative users put it to a real test with the artwork below.

4. Traceability and Documentation of Project Communications

Suppose you work in an industry requiring all communications to be documented for historical, legal, or auditing purposes. In that case, you can export the comments history (for both resolved and unresolved comments) into a PDF file, along with screenshots of the design's original state. 

Let's sum it up: If you run your project through Altium Agile Teams, all your project stakeholders will always have access to the latest committed version. The feedback is captured in the design context, with a clear history of comments and changes captured automatically. Now everyone can log in, review, and contribute feedback at their own pace at any stage of the design, turning your review process into what our users dubbed an "asynchronous" or "continuous" design review.

As a result, as one of our users from Breville reports, "with Altium 365, all communication stays within the project, providing greater transparency, traceability, and accountability of all data." Running their design review and project communications through Altium, combined with other features the platform offers, allowed Breville to cut their product development time, in their own words, by at least four times.

Why Do I Need to Use Altium Agile Teams If There Are Many Cloud Storage and Version Control Solutions Out There?

Some of our more skeptical users might ask why you need Altium Agile Teams if Dropbox and Google Drive are available — why not just use GitHub or something similar for version control? 

While we would need another article to provide a detailed answer, let's say that none of these tools was created to handle ECAD files and hardware design processes. While they can improve storing everything on your local drive, they will remain disconnected from the hardware development cycle. We have users who have built quite robust processes with these tools, but there is always a need for workarounds and compromises, and you need to maintain multiple third-party tools. 

One simple example: Try to upload a schematic sheet to Google Drive and then open the file in your browser or share it with someone who does not have an Altium Designer license. It will look something like this. Not very useful, right?

And now check out the PCB project below, rendered with Altium 365 web viewer technology. Do we need to say more?

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