PCB Manufacturing Documentation

It has always been important to produce accurate and comprehensive documentation for the maufacture and assembly for any design of PCB. It is often assumed that the fabricator or assembler knows what to do anyway so I'll be minimal with my paperwork. Sometimes this is true and mimimum documentation will suffice, however using the doumention tools at your disposal could prevent serious misunderstandings.

The IPC have produced a standard to help designers provide the necessary drawings and support documentation; namely IPC-D-325 this together with the tools provided by your EDA vendor should be enough for you avoid embarrassing misunderstandings.

Example: use the layer naming convention as IPC-D-325 Viz: Primary side is Layer 1

All conductive layers are then numbered sequentionally until the secondary side is reached

PCB designers should know more about PCB substrates

In today’s complex world of electronics design PCB designers need to understand which substrates materials to use and when.
This understanding will bring benefits in reliability and savings in cost. No more broken vias, better impedance control, less timing skew problems and no more mistakes made in selecting unnecessarily expensive grades of FR-4 or polyimide.

IPC-4101B Specification for Base Materials for Rigid and Multilayer Printed Boards (including RoHS compliancy data) is the most comprehensive stanadard available for making sure your impedance calculations have realistic figures and when the need to arises to talk to your fabricator about layer stack-up, borad thickness etc then you can readily appreciate how any changes may affect your design.