Design Reviews

Owned by Jack Christensen
Apr 18, 2022
2 min read

If you’re designing any part of a system, you should be conducting design reviews. This applies whether there are multiple people working on the system or if you’re the only one. If you’re alone on a project, this is a good opportunity to make someone else familiar with your work. Apart from resulting in a better circuit, design reviews will also help ensure that you are never the only one who knows how your project should work. 

Generally on the team design reviews mean opening a PR on GitHub and getting it reviewed / approved. Requests for reviews should happen at three points during the PCB design process (and the same PR should be used for all of them, only being merged in when the PCB is ordered):

  • When you’ve finished the schematics, but haven’t yet designed the PCB. 

  • When you’ve roughly laid out your PCB but haven’t done any routing (this can be a brief one, but it’s much easier to make significant layout changes before doing routing).

  • When the PCB is complete.

When doing design reviews:

  • Keep a record of what was discussed and decided during the review. As reviews are usually done through GitHub PRs, this isn’t really an issue.

  • When presenting a new revision, indicate what has been changed since the last review (a commit message is enough).

  • The reviewee (you) should post a document stating what checks they’ve done. This includes checking that all components are within their operating parameters and that the pinouts for each component match the datasheet. 

  • Design reviews should be tied to a particular commit in Git.