Rule ontology for automatic design verification application to PCB manufacturing and assembly

The transition to the production phase of electronic products requires the product design to follow a large set of constraints that ensure that the electronic product will materialize into a viable product. The printed circuit board (PCB) design is a central part of electronic products and therefore is the part where most constraints are enforced. Although PCB designers already address design constraints with the help of Electrical Computer Aided Design (ECAD) tools that can verify product design rules in an automated manner, there are still many product design rules that are left out of the ECAD tools verification engines, in particular the design rules related to PCB manufacturing and assembly. These rules are many times verified by human visual inspection. This fact increases the risk of running into design errors, leading to increased costs during production phase. This paper proposes a rule ontology representing the large range of constraints imposed by the production phase of electronics products. The rule-based ontology is implemented using a Visual Programming Language (VPL) that facilitates the encoding of the knowledge provided by electronics products manufacturing experts. A practical example is also presented, describing a PCB manufacturing rule and its graphical representation.