Guidelines for Component Placement

Functionality is usually the main focus the first time someone designs a circuit board. With time and experience, designers are able to focus on improving their designs to not simply be functional but also to increase performance. A seasoned designer can make the board robust and cheap while still easy to manufacture and assemble. Particularly, those only vaguely aware of the requirements for mass methodologies of soldering, such as reflow or wave soldering, will create boards that can only be hand soldered or will require extensive manual rework. While hand soldering can be more forgiving of poor layout, this is at the expense of increased time and frustration. Every board designed is unique, will have different requirements, and will require different trade-offs on the design, but there are basic guidelines of component placement that will go a long way toward creating a professional board that can be easily moved from the design table to reality.