MicroZed I\O Card

MICROZED I/O Carrier Card

PCB design has been one of my hobby activities since early 2017 when I was tasked with creating my first PCB. Since then I have created over a dozen PCBs but the MZCC (MicroZed Carrier Card) was one of my most complicated projects due to compact trace routing. This PCB was responsible for translating signals according to different communication protocols. It also performed level shifting and provided LEDs for any signal that was sent or received.

Technical Specifications

Design Program Used : Altium Circuit Maker

Communication Protocols Translated : RS422, RS232, TTL, 5V digital Signals, Analog inputs

PCB Layers : 4

Design Process

This PCB as well as the majority of circuit boards I create follow the basic design flow of, schematic creation, component selection, trace routing, 3D cad, and fabrication. This board had tons of routes and required a 4 layer board in order to fit all the traces.

Cad Model

To ensure the physical board would fit in the enclosure, the board .STP files were generated using a mix of Circuit makers automatic cad generation and several custom parts created using Autodesk Fusion 360

Fabrication

Due to tons of small chips and several ICs, a mix of 2 different fabrication techniques were used for this PCB. For the majority of components I used a solder re-flow oven for the first time to bulk solder most of the components. The results of the re-flow was fairly messy however so hand soldering to clean the board up was required. Hand soldering was also necessary for soldering the plastic headers onto the board.

Lessons learned

This project turned out to be one of the unfortunate projects that never quite work the way you want it too. In the end, the board was fabricated and tested however an issue with power diodes and pin outs was found that forced the team I was working with to revert to a "Plan-B" due to time constraints on the project. The issues that we found were due to a miscommunication between the software/firmware team and myself. Since this issue, any PCB I design is triple checked to ensure the pin mapping matches the inputs and outputs of the PCB.

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