Design reviews
Design reviews (schematics, PCB layout and VHDL firmware code) are very helpful to find errors early on. Most projects on the ohwr site have been extensively reviewed which has saved several design spins. The reviews are also a great way to learn about designing and can help you to explain why a design is done in a certain way. Therefore we suggest that you document the review comments on the ohwr site.
Documenting Design Reviews of Schematics
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
-- Sum of sheets of the schematics
-- 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
Examples of design reviews of schematics
Following above suggestions
- Schematics review 03.02.2012 (from SVEC project)
- Review25042012 (from SVEC project)
Not following the above suggestions
- Review02032010 schematics review (from fmc-adc-100m14b4cha project)
- Review24032010 PCB review (from fmc-adc-100m14b4cha project)
Examples of design reviews of firmware
- VHDL design review of nanoFIP
Erik van der Bij, Carlos Gil Soriano, Matthieu Cattin - 20 July 2012