In the onboarding project for the Electrical sub-team, we’ll be building a board capable of linear voltage regulation, with input and output connectors of your choosing. Voltage regulation is fundamental to every PCB design and is an important concept to understand.
First, we’ll go through what exactly how we’ll implement voltage regulation, and give you the outline for your project. Next, you’ll put all of your parts on a schematic using Altium Designer or KiCad, and then create your physical PCB layout.
At the end of the onboarding project, you’ll have a working design for a linear voltage regulator board, and understand a little more about power electronics.
Lastly, not all information required to complete the project will be contained within this document, and you are highly encouraged to go online and find additional resources to learn more about electronic hardware design.
Let’s begin!
When starting a design, it can generally be useful to start reading datasheets of the components you’ll be using, as well as viewing community-made designs similar to what you’re going for.
In this document, we’ll explain roughly what you need to build your device.
MIC5504: an example of an LDO IC.
A low dropout regulator, linear regulator, or LDO, **takes in an input voltage and steps it down to a reduced output, releasing the remaining power as heat (think about an ideal scenario where there is near-perfect conservation of power ‘P’ and a fixed current ‘I’ in P = IV).
Low dropout regulators are ubiquitous among many PCB designs and are quite simple to implement (being a linear regulator) compared to other DC-to-DC voltage regulators. It’s highly recommended to learn more about them, as they are used everywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-dropout_regulator
Compared to switching regulators, because of their linearity, they have no switching noise, and can produce an output voltage that is quite close to the input voltage.
When implementing them, they typically require accompanying capacitors and/or resistors with specific required values. This is something that is typically outlined in the datasheet, and there are common rules of thumb as well.
If you’re curious, you could visit DigiKey’s website and have a look through the LDO ICs on there, as well as preliminarily select one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor
Various types of capacitors (radial electrolytic, tantalum, etc.)