Schematic capture, footprints and land patterns, layer stackup planning, routing rules, ground and power plane strategy, design-for-manufacturability, and layout-level EMI/EMC habits — the discipline that turns a schematic into a board a fabricator can actually build.
A PCB layout is where every earlier decision in a design becomes physical: the semiconductor devices whose behavior Module 1 covers and the analog building blocks Module 2 covers only become a working circuit once they are placed, connected, and routed on real copper. This module walks through that translation step by step — schematic capture as a design document rather than a formality, component footprints and land patterns, layer stackup planning, and the routing rules that set trace width and clearance from real current-capacity and manufacturing constraints, not guesswork.
By the end of this module you should be able to explain why a solid ground plane is really about guaranteeing a short, predictable return path for every signal, not just providing a reference voltage — and why a plane discontinuity a trace crosses is a self-inflicted EMI source. Module 9 (Signal Integrity) and Module 11 (High-Speed Design) each pick up the return-path and impedance topics introduced here and take them much further.