Digital PCB Designer

Reason quantitatively about voltage, current, resistance and power, and predict what a simple circuit will do before you build it.

Analyse any resistor network by hand using KVL, KCL, dividers and Thevenin equivalents, and know when a divider will collapse under load.

Predict how voltages change over time in RC circuits, and choose a real capacitor by dielectric, voltage rating and derating rather than by capacitance alone.

Predict inductor current behaviour, recognise the flyback problem in any switched inductive load, and read the saturation and DCR specs that actually decide a part choice.

Use the diode's non-linear behaviour deliberately: rectify, clamp, steer, protect and drop voltage, and choose between silicon, Schottky, Zener and TVS with reasons.

Drive loads reliably with BJTs and MOSFETs: choose the device, design the gate or base drive, and calculate the switching and conduction losses that decide whether it survives.

Measure voltage, current, resistance and continuity correctly and safely, understand how the meter loads the circuit, and know what your reading's uncertainty actually is.

Capture and interpret time-domain signals: set up triggers deliberately, choose probe and ground connections that do not lie to you, and decode a digital bus.

Produce inspectable, mechanically sound joints on through-hole and surface-mount parts, and rework a board without destroying it.

Build a working circuit from a schematic on a breadboard, and when it does not work, find the fault by bisection and measurement instead of by staring and swapping parts.

Extract design-critical numbers from a datasheet quickly and correctly, and tell the difference between what is guaranteed, what is typical and what is marketing.

Choose the right physical part, not just the right value: package, tolerance, temperature coefficient, voltage and power rating, and know how those choices constrain your layout and assembly.

Produce a BOM that someone else can actually buy and build from, with real part numbers, checked availability, alternates, and a clear statement of what must not be substituted.

Move fluently between binary, hex and decimal including signed and fixed-point representations, and simplify logic expressions algebraically and with Karnaugh maps.

Design and verify the standard combinational building blocks — decoders, multiplexers, encoders, comparators and adders — and reason about propagation delay and glitches.

Design clocked systems: flip-flops, registers, counters and finite state machines, with correct reset, no metastability hazards, and verified state coverage.

Connect real digital parts together safely: check level compatibility from datasheet numbers, choose the right level shifter, and size pull-ups for open-drain buses.

Build a timing budget for a real interface from datasheet numbers, choose and specify a clock source, and design a reset and power-sequencing scheme that always brings a board up correctly.

Draw the minimal correct schematic for a modern microcontroller: power, decoupling, clock, reset, boot mode, debug and GPIO, with every requirement traced to the reference manual.

Design and debug the three workhorse buses at the hardware level: their electrical requirements, their timing, their topology limits, and how to prove a failing bus is failing.

Specify an LDO correctly — dropout, stability, PSRR and quiescent current — and prove it will not overheat with a real junction temperature calculation.

Specify a buck converter from first principles — inductor, capacitors, feedback, compensation — and lay out the hot loop so it does not radiate or oscillate.

Design a power delivery network that holds the rail steady under fast transient current, using the right capacitor values, placements and plane structure — and know why the usual folklore is often wrong.

Run a KiCad project properly end to end at the schematic stage: project structure, hierarchical sheets, net classes, ERC to zero, version control, and a schematic another engineer can review.

Create a correct symbol and footprint for a part that does not exist in any library, verify the land pattern against the datasheet and IPC, and manage libraries so a design is reproducible on another machine.

Choose a layer stackup for your board's real requirements and place components so that the routing, the power delivery, the thermals and the mechanics all work — before drawing a single track.

Route a board deliberately: trace widths from current and temperature, via strategy, layer discipline, differential pairs and length matching, with every choice traceable to a number.

Reason about return current, reflections and radiation well enough to design a board that works at speed and has a chance of passing emissions testing first time.

Set design rules from your fabricator's real capability and your own electrical requirements, then verify a board systematically so that DRC-clean actually means correct.

Generate and check the complete manufacturing data package — gerbers, drill, netlist, centroid, BOM, drawings and notes — so a fabricator and an assembler can build the board without asking a question.

Take a newly fabricated board from unpowered to fully verified using a disciplined order of operations, and diagnose the faults you find down to a root cause and a design change.

Run and receive a hardware design review that finds real problems, and release a design with the traceability, documentation and change control that lets someone else build it in two years.