Working with the CERN PCB Design Office

One very common way to design Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) at CERN is to have designers work on the schematics and then ask the central PCB Design Office to do the layout. The Design Office will also prepare all the manufacturing files and even manage production of prototypes with subcontractors or (in cases of great urgency) at CERN.

The Design Office will gladly accept your schematics using any of three PCB design tools: Cadence, Altium and KiCad. For reasons which are explained in this article, if you want to open-source your hardware design, it is better to use KiCad, a Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) tool to which CERN has actually contributed extensively through the years. Both Cadence and Altium are proprietary tools.

All the information you need to start working with the Design Office is here.