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What is Annotation and Back Annotation

in PCB Design?
OrCAD PCB Solutions
4-5 minutes

There are two cases where the words annotation and back-annotation
will come up in the context of PCB design. One has to do with the
general EDA (electronic design automation) workflow: you’re moving
from schematic to PCB layout and back again multiple times, and simply
need to ensure that all the reference designators are still relevant. The
other is a bit more technical and has to do with electronic simulation.
There’s a concept called propagation delay. Regardless of which brought
you to this post, we’ll cover everything you need to know about
annotation and back annotation in PCB design.

What do we mean by annotation and back-annotation in

PCB design?
Let’s take a look at your basic EDA workflow.
The PCB design process generally starts with a schematic: a simple
block diagram of the different components and their connections. Absent
from the schematic are any details of the physical layout of the board.
The schematic simply represents the components and their electrical
connections. It is essentially a visual manifestation of a netlist. You create
the schematic using an EDA tool called a schematic editor (e.g. OrCAD
Capture).
The next phase of development is to take that schematic and transform it
into a physical board layout. The PCB layout is a 3D representation of
schematic, containing all the physical dimensions of your board, including
the size of components, traces, holes, and other features. This is handled
using an EDA tool called a PCB editor (e.g. OrCAD PCB Editor or
Cadence Allegro).
As you’re probably already well aware, one rarely just goes straight from
schematic to layout to production. Instead, design is more iterative, with
simulation identifying design improvements that generate engineering
change orders (ECOs) which require both schematic and layout to
undergo numerous updates.
The process of keeping the schematic information up to date with the
layout is called annotation. Since changes are often discovered on the
layout stage, you’ll often find yourself updating the schematic to match
your new layout, updating the data entries for the schematic based on
changes to the layout is called back annotation.
Most of this occurs automatically when you use schematic and PCB
editors from the same family of EDA tools.

Reference designators
The next question you might ask, is what information is being updated
when you annotate a layout or back-annotate a schematic? Recall that a
netlist consists of reference designators for components and their
corresponding connections. When you have to manually back-annotate a
schematic, you are usually renaming a reference designator, changing a
pin number, or swapping gates.

Circuit simulation
Circuit simulation plays a critical role in designing PCBs for manufacture.
If you want to gauge how your board will perform in the real world before
investing in the physical fabrication of a prototype, electronic simulation is
the way to go.
Your most basic circuit simulation will take a netlist of components and
connections and run some calculations to model its electrical
performance. This test can be run in a schematic editor or on the PCB
layout itself.
As you might have guessed, the simulation will be more accurate if run
on the layout where propagation delays based on component locations
can be factored into the simulation. Two identical components can
experience very different logic gate timings depending on where they are
physically located in a circuit. As a result, your PCB layout can end up
very different from your schematic, necessitating an update.
Conclusion
Both annotation and back-annotation are much easier when you use
EDA tools from the same family of software. Often times it’s as simple as
extracting data from the layout and loading it into the schematic to ensure
all information is correct. Check out Cadence’s suite of PCB design and
analysis tools today.

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