Hi Scott,
Great question with some very informed answers so far.
This is a vast area and the needs of a hobbyist building a few boards for their own use will be very different to the needs of a company shipping many millions of assembled PCBs in finished products.
That said, here are two checks that are well worth doing. Obviously, this is not an exhaustive list but these two issues apply to projects of every budget and complexity. I have seen organisations of all sizes overlook these checks.
- Check the footprint of each component on the PCB again and again … and then, again. Sooner or later, everybody gets a footprint wrong. It is frustrating, embarrassing and imminently avoidable. It’s also a rite of passage so don’t beat yourself up too much. Just try to make sure you go through it on one of your own PCBs rather than on a client’s PCB.
- If you have a crystal in your design, e.g. to provide the clock source for a microcontroller, do the calculations to ensure that the crystal will definitely start to oscillate and will oscillate at the right frequency. It is not unusual for a crystal to operate on a single board at room temperature. It is well worth doing the work to ensure that it will do so on all PCBs across process, voltage, and temperature (PVT). I have seen many products suffer from this issue after the product has been manufactured in volume, or worse, shipped to customers.
Hope this helps.
Best regards,
Kieran