Simple Tips for an Effective PCB Design Check (EAGLE Software)

After many hard-working hours, you finally have your PCB design completed and ready to send it to a circuit board manufacturing companyBut how can you ensure that the PCB you just designed is going to meet your expectations when manufactured?

In this article, we will give you some simple but effective tips on how you can make your PCB look and work just the way you expect when sending it to a manufacturer.

If you are reading this article, you most likely are already familiar with the Eagle CAD software to design PCBs. In case you are not, there are hundreds of tutorials out there that can teach you how to use Eagle. Today we won’t be focusing on how to design PCBs, but rather on what to do once the design is complete

Step 1: Tip 1: Check for Shorts

One of the first things you can check for is shorts. These are caused by overlapping two or more traces on the same layer. Simply clear all layers in Layer Settings except for the top layer.

Fig.3 — Top Layer: This is a very easy way to visually inspect the board to make sure the traces are good.

You can even apply Ratsnest to have a better view of your layout.

Fig.4 — Top Layer with Ratsnest

Now let's see how a short would look like:

Fig.5 — PCB with a Short: You can see it is very easy to spot a short with this technique.