PCB-ready breakout boards: Bridging the gap between electronics prototyping and production

TL;DR

This paper discusses integrating PCB design automation tools into the electronics prototyping process to enable seamless transition from prototypes to production-ready PCB designs, reducing expertise barriers.

Contribution

It highlights the potential for incorporating recent PCB automation paradigms into prototyping workflows to create PCB-ready breakout boards efficiently.

Findings

Automation can streamline PCB design transition

Prototyping cycle integration reduces skill barriers

Facilitates rapid move to production-ready PCBs

Abstract

Electronics prototyping using breakout boards allows designers with and without an engineering background to rapidly create interactive prototypes. However, when it comes to transition to a production-ready PCB design, stagnation exists due to the high skill floor required for PCB design. While PCB design automation has been used successfully in recent research tools to reduce the required expertise, little has been done to integrate these tools directly into the electronics prototyping cycle. This position paper aims to bring attention to the possibility of integrating recent PCB design automation paradigms into the electronics prototyping cycle for the creation of PCB-ready breakout boards: breakout boards whose designs would have the ability to be pipelined directly into new user interfaces that leverage the use of automation for the rapid creation of production-ready PCB designs.