Evaluating environmental factors for pre-layout board design

Product design for environment (DfE) has been an area of emerging interest for electronics manufacturers in recent years. An important aspect of DfE is the linkage of manufacturing process waste emissions and energy consumption with parameters in product design. In this paper, a linkage is developed between the process wastes generated in printed circuit board (PCB) fabrication and board specifications. A set of process models for estimating waste mass quantities is combined with a multi criteria health hazard evaluation scheme. A waste minimization formulation is presented for pre-layout board analysis. The emphasis of this formulation is on tiling of the boards on a panel and its impact on the waste stream generation but a special feature of the formulation is that it respects the functional requirements for the board design by incorporating them as the constraints of the waste optimization problem. A PCB design for a multi-layer board is presented to show implementation of the procedure.