Notes on PCB traceability

One of the little things in board design that a lot of hobbyists neglect (although the practice is fairly widespread in industry) is traceability. This pretty much means you should be able to do two things:

• Given a physical PCB, find the exact version of the CAD files used for it (and, in a team environment, figure out who designed it)
• Each physical PCB should have some unique marking so that repairs, etc can be logged.

Most people sign their PCBs with a name and/or company logo in a corner, but don't go further than that. Once you have two or three versions of a board sitting around your lab and you don't know which ones are the most recent, it gets difficult to even know which bare board to assemble when you need an extra!

The first half of my standard traceability tag is normally on the front side of the board along one edge. (The board shown is the first prototype of my SNMP-managed 5V/12V DC power distribution unit, which will be described in more detail in a future post once I've debugged it a bit more.)

Traceability tag on PDU board

This tag consists of five distinct pieces of information:

1. Logos / icons providing general info about the board. In this case there's three - open hardware, recyclable electronics, and lead-free. (Almost all of my boards are BSD licensed; all of them use SAC305 solder and are Pb-free and RoHS compliant.)
2. A brief one-line summary of what the board does: "IP-Controlled 5V/12V DC PDU". This could include a product name if applicable.
3. My name. This is obviously a matter of personal pride to some extent, but in a team environment it's handy for the firmware engineer to know who to ask if there's a question about layout. etc.
4. The Subversion revision number of the layout file. KiCAD files are plain text so I can simply use svn:keywords to insert the revision number directly into the silkscreen layer. As long as I remember to commit before exporting Gerber files for fab, this tag will let me look up the exact layout revision for the board.
5. A short-URL pointing to the directory in my public Google Code repository for this board.

The underside of the board has one last item: the serial number.

Serial number on XC6SLX9 dev board

I usually assemble the first prototype of a new board by itself, tinker with it for a while, perhaps do some rework, and then assemble the rest if things look good. Sometimes there are slight BOM changes, for example changing the speed grade of a part or the capacity of a a memory device. Having a serial number on the board makes it easy to keep track which boards have had which fixes applied.