Motherboards – The Designing Process

Have you ever just looked at a motherboard and wondered how it was designed? How did the design engineers decide where to place certain chips, or components? What are these strange components placed all over the board? Why do motherboard manufacturers make a big deal out of multi-layer PCB’s? Today we’ll be taking a good look at what exactly goes into the process of a motherboard’s design, from the planning stages to the finished product.

Since this can be a very complex topic, I’m not going to be covering every last step, and I won’t be going into incredible depth in areas that do not require it to be done. Not everyone out there is an aspiring CE or EE and has prior knowledge or the time to set aside and learn some of the more complex topics that I’ll be discussing today. This article is based off of both personal research, and aid from Rob Bruckner, a Senior Motherboard Design Engineer at Intel Corporation. What do I hope you’ll take away from this article? Simple, a new found respect for the immense amount of thought and work that goes into designing all that is a motherboard.

Motherboards – The Designing Process @ MBReview