Automotive PCB Design: Practical Guide to Automotive Electronics and AEC-Q Requirements
Automotive PCB Design - Extended Edition
Practical Engineering for Reliable, High-Performance and Production-Ready Automotive Electronics
Modern vehicles depend on increasingly complex electronic systems, from body-control modules and power converters to high-speed gateways, ADAS sensors, radar modules and electrified powertrains. Designing the PCB inside these systems requires much more than schematic capture and component placement. Automotive hardware must operate reliably under electrical transients, temperature extremes, vibration, humidity, electromagnetic interference and long service lifetimes while remaining manufacturable and testable at production scale.
This Extended Edition provides a comprehensive and practical engineering approach to automotive PCB development, expanding the treatment from fundamental design decisions to verification, qualification and controlled production release.
The book follows the complete engineering lifecycle:
REQUIREMENTS → ARCHITECTURE → SCHEMATIC → STACKUP → PLACEMENT → ROUTING → SI / PI / EMC → THERMAL & MECHANICAL → PROTOTYPE → VALIDATION → PRODUCTION
Topics include:
- Automotive Requirements and Architecture - translating vehicle-level requirements into PCB constraints, functional partitioning and design-review gates.
- Functional Safety and Reliability - fault containment, redundancy, FMEA, common-cause failures, derating and design margins.
- Power Architecture and Protection - vehicle power entry, transients, reverse polarity, DC/DC converters, PDN design and decoupling.
- CAN, LIN and High-Speed Interfaces - balanced routing, return paths, differential transitions, connectors and signal integrity.
- Processor, MCU, FPGA and Memory Design - BGA escape, clocking, power sequencing and high-speed interconnects.
- Analog and Sensor Interfaces - low-level signals, ADCs, references, filtering and mixed-signal partitioning.
- Power Electronics and Load Drivers - switching stages, inductive loads, current sensing and noise containment.
- EV and High-Voltage Electronics - BMS architecture, isolation, creepage, clearance and controlled high-voltage partitioning.
- EMC and EMI Engineering - emissions, immunity, common-mode currents, harness coupling, shielding and debugging.
- Thermal and Mechanical Design - heat spreading, enclosure coupling, vibration, board flex and component reliability.
- Automotive RF and 77 GHz Radar - RF front ends, antenna structures, mmWave materials, transitions and EM verification.
- DFM, Assembly and Production - fabrication constraints, process capability, inspection, traceability and end-of-line testing.
- Validation and Design Assurance - environmental testing, root-cause analysis, reliability evidence and controlled change management.
Numerous engineering diagrams, workflow maps, comparison figures and practical review matrices connect circuit intent to the physical PCB implementation.
Rather than treating SI, PI, EMC, thermal, mechanical, safety and manufacturing as independent disciplines, this book shows how they interact within the same hardware.
Automotive PCB Design - Extended Edition is intended for PCB designers, hardware engineers, electronic engineers, EMC and signal-integrity engineers, automotive professionals and advanced students who want to understand how automotive electronics progress from requirements to robust, validated and production-ready hardware.
It forms part of the broader PCB Engineering Mastery Series, where each volume addresses a specific discipline while contributing to a unified treatment of professional PCB engineering.
Customer Reviews
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
