circuit board design and layout

Printed Circuit Board Layout Services

Fixed Price Quote for PCB Layout

To construct an excellent building, you must have excellent blueprints.

Save time and money imageThe same can be said for printed circuit board layout. A successful product begins with professional layout and documentation. At CDS, we provide unparalleled layout service with senior technicians, each of whom has at least 25 years of experience. Unlike competitors that offer hourly services, we provide a fixed-price quote for your PCB layout. This way, you know your costs going into the project, instead of having an uncertain and open-ended hourly quote.

PCB Layout Design with Altium and PADS

The two platforms we use for PCB layout are Altium and PADS. We use these platforms because of their continuity since they were introduced and because they are two of the most widely used platforms in the industry. Free CAD platforms do exist, but you should be advised that most of them cannot handle complex boards and, most importantly, they are made by bare-board manufacturers to work specifically with their proprietary processes. Furthermore, these programs do not produce industry-standard outputs, such as Gerber files and IPC-356 files, unless you pay for them. We feel it is dangerous to rely on a lower-capability or nonstandard program just to save a few pennies.

altium logo
PADS logo

CDS Excels at Complex Boards

example of a complex board

Our designers are well-versed in all types of PCB designs, including high-layer-count boards, blind and buried vias, flex and rigid-flex boards, and mixed-material boards. One area of particular importance is high-speed design. Often, impedance-controlled designs rely too much on the physical construction of the PCB. That’s only part of the solution. Typically, TDR testing for impedance-controlled designs has a standard manufacturing variance of +/- 10%. In addition, the standard manufacturing variance for PCB manufacturing is also +/- 10%. It’s possible to see the issue very quickly if you are simply trying to control impedance with bare-board construction alone: your variance level has already increased to +/- 20%.

Impedence Control Experts

Our designers, using accurate impedance-control calculators, design the bare-board stack-up and submit these boards to our manufacturing engineers to ascertain that our design and bare-board construction will meet your impedance requirements, without using custom pre-preg or material thicknesses. This review is done before the layout even starts. This way, by using more widely available materials, your bare-board costs are lowered, and you have more choices in suppliers that can manufacture your bare boards.

Experience Counts!

Finally, all our designers have years of experience in PCB manufacturing and assembly. Unlike inexperienced technicians that may just know a software program, our designers know and have actively worked in the entire process. That means we have literally thousands of hours of experience in the various types of design, as well as experience in what works on the manufacturing floor.

You might say that we design for manufacturing the way it was meant to be - from the PCB layout forward!

If we can be of assistance to you, simply click the button below to send us your information. We’ll be happy to prepare a quote and help make your project a reality!

REQUEST A PCB LAYOUT QUOTE

Have a question?

Contact us through our representative or submit a business inquiry online.

Contact us