After you’ve designed your board and ordered a prototype the job is only partially done. The design itself needs to be properly documented and stored outside of your standard working directory to ensure data integrity. This way you never accidentally make a change and save over an archieved design. To go along with this, it’s highly recommended to have your design documentation either traditionally packed up to another hard drive/cloud or under proper revision control using SVN or Git.
The first step to proper documentation lies in how you store your files. In this post I’m going to walk through an example.
In Figure 1 below I’m detailing the top-level directory. Here the top level folder is split either by customer or product line depending on if you’re a contractor or an employee. Nested under this are individual folders split by project type. Where they could be software, FPGA, firmware, or PCB projects.
Figure 1: The Design Library
The design folder itself can be seen below. Here we organise our information into three primary folders. The first are all relevant datasheets that aren’t jellybean components. It’s important to catalog the information at time of design just in case documentation changes or is updated on the manufactuer side. This way we have some form of documentation showing that any new erata was found after the initial deisgn. This is also incredibly useful when conducting a design review. Everything is at-the-ready and you never have to hunt down anything online. Then you have all of your primary design documents. These are typically Theory-of-Operation, SPICE simulations, pinout planning documents, etc.
Finally, we have the Revision folder. This is where all of the core files for your project reside. These are typically labeled by the revision number, such as "Rev 11". What’s important here is that we define what a revision is. I personally define as when the physical copper changes. BOM updates, changes, sourcing, etc would cause an alpha increment. What I mean by this, is that we’ll have a "Rev 11 A", "Rev 11 B", etc.
The revision folder is split into five primary folders. The first being any additional design files for that specific revision. This could include quality information, test results, and general notes for that revision. Then we split the exported data from the design into their own folders for the BOM, gerbers, and pick-and-place information. We conclude with the actual release packages that would be handed off to an assembler to actually produce the designs.
Figure 2: The Design Folder