How to Design a PCB?

In order to design a PCB, you will need to design the schemtic of the electric circuit first.  There are tools that can help you to go through the entire process, and they are called EDA (Electronic Design Automation) tools. Here is an incompleted list of widely used EDA tools:

• Altium Designer ($$$): https://www.altium.com/
• KiCAD (Free): https://www.kicad.org/
• EasyEDA (Free): https://easyeda.com/
• Fritzing (Free): https://fritzing.org/
• Eagle (Free for personal usage, $$ for commercial): https://www.autodesk.com/products/eagle/free-download

All these EDA tools allow you to deisgn the schematic and then create the PCB layout. They all have connectivity checking tool built-in, and can make sure your PCB layout compliant with your schematic definition.

These EDA tools have their own PCB file formats. Can you provide the PCB file to PCB manufacturor for production? No, it is actually a very bad idea, because the manufacturor may not have the exact version of EDA tool like yours, and even if they do, they may not have the exact configuration in software like yours. As a result, they may not see the PCB design as you see it, and may produce the PCB in a wrong way. The correct way to do this is to export your PCB file to gerber format, whch will define the PCB in very certain way and can avoid any misunderstanding. All EDA tools support exporting PCB file to gerber format.

Once you have PCB design files in gerber format, you may upload it (as a ZIP file) in our website for preview and price esitmation.