Printed Circuit Board Design in Computer-Aided Design Tool

Printed Circuit Board (PCB) design has traditionally been carried out using Electronic Design Automation (EDA) software tools, which are developed mainly for electrical circuit analysis and for simulating the operation of electronic circuits. Recently, CAD software tools, in addition to their primary purpose, have started offer the electrical circuit analysis with PCB design. The advantage of using CAD tools for PCB design lies in their familiar user interface and integration with existing drawing and modeling skills. This integration allows students / engineers to approach PCB design comprehensively, while from an educational perspective, students can more efficiently acquire new skills without the need to learn an entirely new interface. This paper presents a comparison of PCB design using CAD tool and EDA tool with an emphasis on analysis in the field of schematic capture, components library, PCB layout and 3D visualizations. The examples used for the analysis are based on the teaching material of the ‘Circuit analysis with EDA’ course at the graduate study of Electrical engineering at the Zagreb University of Applied Sciences.