How to document design reviews
Standardising the way of documenting design reviews will help the ease of interpreting the comments. At CERN we came up with the following suggestions.
1.- Sheet references
Group the comments by schematic page that they belong to. Some check the design in Altium and others the schematics pdf. For those that review from schematics, please reference the comments to both the sheet number and the name of the page (bad numbering is happening too often in designs).
2.- Subdivision of the review
Divide the review comments in the following sections:
+ Schematics
-- Schematics pages
-- BOM
+ Layout
-- Power planes
-- Clocks
-- High speed lines
-- FPGAs
-- IOs
-- rest of layout
3.- Reference to components
Use the IC**, R**, C**, L** identifier of components in addition to the usual references like AD5662, VMEH22501, Si570. It will reduce the chances of interpretation errors.
4.- Tagging by relevancy
Use a scale for the relevancy of the comments and order the comments accordingly:
! : fatal
+ : important
- : minor
? : question
* : note
A comment in your review file could look like this:
! VCC pin in IC14 is connected to GND
Handling the review comments
You can document the review comments in a wiki. Then when you make corrections and comments, it is best to create a separate wiki page where you have the place to add comments.
Example:
-
- Improvements after design review of FMCADC100M14b4cha, example of how review comments are handled.
14 June 2016