PCB DESIGN USING ALTIUM, KPR Institute Engineering and Technology, Autonomous Engineering Institution, Coimbatore, India

PCB design using Altium Industrial one-credit course was organized by the ECE department in PCB Laboratory from 29.03.2023 to 1.4.2023. Around 29 students attended the program. The session was handled by Mr. Chandru T, Managing Director, Powerline Circuits, and Dr. Finney Daniel Shadrach, AP (SL.G) / ECE. The session was divided into two parts, namely design and reverse engineering. PCB design helps in bringing electronic circuits to life in their physical form. In the design part students were exposed to the various PCB design processes involved in Altium software such as schematics, schematic library, footprint generation, PCB library, PCB layout, routing, and Gerber generation. Further, students were also given awareness about the various open-source PCB software available in the market such as Kicad, Eagle, Allegro, etc., Moreover students were also exposed to Altium 365, which is a cloud based environment for PCB. The importance using it was also clearly felt with the help of a demo. In the second part, reverse engineering is carried out. Each student was given a PCB board and was asked to clone the board. Professional software tools were used for carrying reverse engineering. In order to enhance their practical knowledge the students were given a simple project module and were asked to design it. They were divided into batches and they were made to do the reverse engineering process. Students felt interested and the participants were also explained about the SDG and were able to justify it in connection to PCB. At the end of the session, students were able to design the PCB board at industry standard.