PCB+Education

=Free/Inexpensive Printed Circuit Board (PCB) Design Education=

On this page I'm collecting information, webinars, articles, and online courses about PCB design. While I'd like to link to free items only, the world is not perfect, and I'm also including some pay-for links as well, but I'll try to avoid any tremendous investment things such as full-on university major programs. But some things won't be for free.

Books

 * Right the First Time, a Practical Handbook on High Speed PCB and System Design Volume is available as a free download.
 * All About Circuits provides a number of online "textbooks", as well as forums.
 * Lessons in Electric Circuits provides some "open" books under the Design Science License.
 * BGA Breakouts and Routing book by Mentor Graphics engineer Charles Pfeil. It's also available as a free pdf download now as well as a 1/2 hour webinar.
 * Flexible Circuit Technology book in free pdf form
 * The HDI Handbook (High Density Interconnect) is available as a free download as well. The download form also lets you get the Flexible Circuit Technology book above, an addendum to that, and another ebook called Survival is not Mandatory.
 * Power 2 You is a free ebook about power supplies. As it's a Lattice Semi book, expect it to talk about their power chips and tools. They have previously given away free print copies as well.
 * Build Your own Printed Circuit Board book, is a tutorial about using Eagle schematic/PCB tools
 * High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic by Howard Johnson is said to be a very good book on this topic.
 * High Speed Signal Propogation: Advanced Black Magic also by Howard Johnson
 * Electronics Lab sells the book PCB Design of High Speed Circuits and has an on-site training course using it. They also have a course about SMT Soldering.
 * Land Patterns Made Simple by SMT Plus.
 * SMT Plus has a number of books such as Land Patterns Made Simple, SMT High Density Design and DFM, Extremely Dense Designs and DFM, Using BGA anf Flip Chip Technology, and more. Seems these books are also available from Engineering Lab and used in their online and onsite training courses.
 * IPC-7315B standard - Generic Requirements for Surface Mount Design and Land Pattern Standard
 * IPC has a number of other standards, design guides, etc. documents and training media for designers, testers, fabricators, etc.
 * Rick Hartley spoke at Freescale Technology Forum 2011 and provided a suggested reading list of PCB and EMI books. I've duplicated this list as a Universal Amazon wishlist. You don't have to buy from Amazon, I just like the convenience of making lists this way.

Magazines

 * Printed Circuit Design and Fab is a magazine for professionals, and qualified engineers may get a free subscription.
 * So is EDN.
 * And Electronic Component News (ECN).
 * And Evaluation Engineering.
 * And Power Electronics Technology.
 * And Electronic Design.
 * And CircuiTree.
 * As is RTC Magazine, which talks about Embedded Computing topics.
 * PCB Design 007 is an online magazine about PCB design.
 * PCB 007 is an online magazine about PCB topics.
 * EMS 007 / SMT is an online magazine.
 * Flex 007 is an online magazine about flexible circuit topics.
 * Nuts and Volts is not free, but is not expensive.

Webinars

 * Dan Beeker's webinar at Freescale: Effective Printed Circuit Board Designfrom ???. I had the pleasure to attend his 4-hour talk at FTF2011. (you may have to register/login for free to see this)
 * Ralph Morrison's webinar at Freescale : //Field Theory Overview: Focus on high frequency design// from FTF2008, possibly shortened. I had the pleasure of attending his 4-hour talk at FTF2011. (you may have to register/login for free to see this)
 * Printed Circuit University is an online site with webinars, blogs, papers, and other information about PCB topics. This has both free cost and pay-for content, and some certificate things.
 * Search on Youtube for tutorials on using your PCB tools.
 * Be The Signal has a lot of information available about Signal Integrity.
 * NexLogic has some online videos about PCB Design and production.
 * EEVblog video podcast #176 is a tutorial about charging Lithium Ion batteries.
 * Mentor has a number of good presentations, including:
 * Effective BGA Fanout Patterns
 * Element14 Webinars
 * Eagle Doing the Basics webinar
 * Eagle Creating the Board webinar


 * Eagle Multilayer webinar - Layer and Via setup, Microvias
 * BGA layout guidelines–Designing for manufacturability webinar

Courses

 * Open CouseWare from various universities such as MIT, Stanfordand their iTunes set, UC Berkeley, Korea University offers a number of engineering courses. Some courses directly related to PCB Design are MIT's Prototyping Avionics, Biomedical Devices Design Lab, and How to Make (Almost) Anything.
 * Golden Gate graphics has an online PCB training program called Streamlined Design.
 * EETimes has a number of courses, including Fundamentals of PCB design, Power Disutribution, Signal Integrity, etc.
 * A free email course about PCB Assembly Techniques.
 * AB Tech Europe offers some online courses in SMT rework/assembly and other things. They also have tech books about making manufacturable land patterns and other topics.
 * SMT Plus also has a number of courses about PCB design, soldering, assembly, etc.
 * AMS has some microcontroller/microprocessor courses as well.
 * Udemy has an inexpensive course Learn to Create Circuit Boards (using Eagle)
 * Udemy also has Electronic Circuit Board Layout using Fritzing
 * And Udemy also has the inexpensive Diseño de circuitos impresos con DesignSpark PCB (In Spanish I think, I'd love to see an English version)
 * Udemy has a (currently free) course about KiCad PCB
 * FE Academy has a few more advanced courses using Altium Designer. While Altium is not priced as a hobbyist tool, the topics in these courses sound very interesting, and he mentions that the 30 day free evaluation license for Altium may suffice, if you get through things quickly enough. These sound like projects based courses, but I'm very interested to see if much of the experience or at least the advanced design ideals will be helpful to users on other tools as well. They have more advanced (and more expensive) course time working with their Open-Source ARM PCB design project called iMX6 Rex (module + carrier board)

Articles
(keep in mind Dan Beeker's advice to look at app notes as lies until proven correct)
 * HOWTO for using OpenEMS 3d Field Solver with Cadsoft Eagle PCB.
 * PCB Stackup Planning
 * Multilayer PCB Stackup Planning
 * Proper Stack-Up in a Multilayer PCB to Reduce Noise Coupling and Improve EMI
 * Advanced PCB Design and Layout for EMC Part 7 - Routing and layer stacking, including microvia technology
 * HDI Layer Stackups for Large Dense PCBs whitepaper
 * How to Get Started in HDI with MicroVias whitepaper
 * Power Integrity Effects of High Density Interconnect (HDI) whitepaper
 * EE Times has a LOT of articles, webinars and courses.
 * SMTnet has a lot of articles on various PCB topics.
 * Xilinx has a lot of articles about PCB Signal Integrity
 * Fundamentals of Signal Integrity is a three part series of articles from Mentor Graphics. Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
 * Design Techniques for EMC is a number of articles about PCB design for Electromagnetic Compliance
 * Advanced PCB Design and Layout is another number of articles about PCB design for Electromagnetic Compliance
 * Board Routability Guidelines with Xilinx Fine-Pitch BGA Packages Xilinx XAPP157.pdf (odd that Xilinx doesn't seem to host this themselves anymore)
 * Designing with High Density BGA Packages for Altera Devices
 * PCB Design and Fabrication School is a blog about PCB stuff.
 * Mentor Graphics also has a number of PCB Whitepapers available, including:
 * BGA Breakout Challenges
 * In Circuit Design has some articles.
 * Montrose Compliance Services has another bunch of whitepapers.
 * Intel article about Printed Circuit Board Test Methodology.
 * Intel article Controlled Impedance Design and Test.
 * The Free Library has an article about Design for Impedance Testing.
 * Elmatica has an article about PCB Controlled Impedance.
 * Speeding Edge has an article about PCB Test structures, such as for testing that the fab gave you what you designed to.
 * Polar Instruments has an article about Controlled Impedance Test.
 * Here is an article about Measuring Characteristic Impedance and Effective Dielectric Constant using a Vector Network Analyzer.
 * Entrepreneur has an article about PCB Stackup and its affect on impedance, signal integrity, etc. This seems to be a series of articles, check otu others of them too.
 * The Pulse: Zen and the art of Accurate Impedance measurement. Another link to the same.
 * Eric Bogatin article TDR and VNA Techniques for PCB Characterization.
 * Aritcle about Design for Testing - Impedance Controlled Boards.
 * <span class="wiki_link_ext">Streamline Circuits has an article about Impedance Modeling.
 * <span class="wiki_link_ext">Hindawi has an article about Design of PCB Impedance Matching Inductors and Antennas for Single-Chip Communications Systems. Yea, I['m collecting a bunch of stuff about impedance, I'll read them later.
 * <span class="wiki_link_ext">Hott Consultants has some EMC and SI information online, and they do seminars. This includes a PCB Design Guide,
 * <span class="wiki_link_ext"><span class="wiki_link_ext">Kaist has a number of articles/Confrence slide presentations about PCB design. Here's an article with the Kaist name on it, seems incomplete, but I don't see it listed on the Kaist website.
 * <span class="wiki_link_ext">NexLogic has some whitepapers about PCB Design and production.
 * <span class="wiki_link_ext">DisplayPort layout guidelines from NXP
 * <span class="wiki_link_ext">High Speed PCB Design Considerations by Lattice
 * <span class="wiki_link_ext">PCB Stackup Overview for Intel Architecture Platforms by Intel

Forums
Note that just because a furom may be hosted by a particular tool vendor, there may be a great deal of tool-agnostic information in there, such as good design practices, examples of good and bad design details, etc. > Element14 is a community for designers to share ideas and help each other, and is also the new home of Cadsoft Eagle forums.
 * PCB Libraries forum has good information about good library design practices. (footprints, symbols, etc.)
 * PCBstandards have forums for various PCB tools.
 * Designers Guide Community has forums and other resources that may be useful to PCB design.
 * PCB Heaven Forums
 * IPC TechNet is an email based forum
 * EDAboard has a variety of forum topics including PCB.
 * SMTNet has PCB design forums
 * Board Talk forum
 * The Electrical Engineering forum at Stack Exchange is good for PCB topics as well as others.
 * EverythingPCB has a list of various online PCB forums.
 * SparkFun has good discussion forum for hobbyists
 * DesignSpark forums
 * DipTrace forum
 * Mentor Graphics PCB forums
 * Cadence PCB forums

DVDs

 * Howard Johnson at Signal Integrity Lab has some DVDs available as companions to his Black Magic books.
 * CEDA has a DVD about High Speed PCB Design (item # 13). They also have a course about Embedded Systems design (item #9) that talks about microcontrollers, interfaces, software, and Operating System stuff.
 * CA Design has a set of DVDs showing how to use Cadence Allegro tools. A bit expensive, but might be good.

Misc/Other Lists

 * San Jose State University has has a list of various things for electronic design called Mechatronics Tutorial Information.

Conferences (even though they are not free)

 * PCB West and/or PCB East
 * Freescale Technology Forum (FTF) - check out Dan Beeker and friends. Presentation slides in PDF for most past sessions are on Freescale's website. These guys highly recommend PCB West/East above.