[Proposal] A work-group to add an Eco-design tool to KiCad PCB Calculator

[Vincent Grennerat]

I have been continuously using KiCad since 2005 (I am a former colleague of JP Charras), and I am now focusing my research on increasing the sustainability of electronics, especially at the PCB level. In this context I am member of the DESIRE4EU research project (https://desire4eu-eic.eu) which has the aim to bring to industry new innovative low-impact substrates for PCB, compatible with current subtractive manufacturing technologies. With Arduino onboard, we are currently designing (on KiCad of course!) the next IoT Arduino board, through an eco-design approach.

Part of my work consists of exploring new PCB design rules that would significantly contribute to reduce the ecological footprint of PCBs (typically 5 to 25% of an assembled electronic board), at the manufacturing step and at end-of-life. I now think that CAD softwares could include sone kind of eco-design tool to help the designers in evaluating and reducing the ecological footprint of their design. The tool could be part of the KiCad toolbox, inside the PCB Calculator application. Among other things, it would probably rely on life cycle assessment macro-results (a small database), upstream produced by some LCA software.

I cannot be a software contributor to KiCad, but if some developers show interest in this potential new tool, I could contribute to provide the inputs and the design of the tool. I suppose that this "eco-design rules" concept can seem rather vague for a lot of people, and I'd be delighted to develop our research results on copper circularity, and how we can rethink our way of laying out copper on the PCB layers.

[oliver munz]

What do you think makes manufacturing more environmentally friendly? Fewer copper layers? Less copper etching? Less material, meaning smaller and thinner PCBs? Or is it also about the manufacturing process itself? For example, how many holes, how much milling path, and whether or not there's any component placement pressure?

Would glass be better than fiberglass epoxy?

What exactly is this about?

[José Angelo Amado]

Hello friends,

I'll give my suggestion for making insulating substrates for PCBs. 

Imagine grinding pistachio shells and then pressing them into PCB shapes using appropriate glue. It might work, and the solution could also contribute to clean energy.

Angelo

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José Angelo Amado

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[Seth Hillbrand]

Hello Vincent-

I'd be happy to hear more about what you have in mind for design rules that can improve this.  If you have design mock-ups for calculator panels and/or DRC-type rules that can be codified, we should be able to work with you to help implement them.

The best way to share these ideas would be in a GitLab issue report.  Use KiCad's Help->Report Bug menu option to get the link and formatting.  Then, add your description and images.  In this case, images will be very important.

Seth

Seth Hillbrand

Lead Developer

+1-530-302-5483‬

Long Beach, CA

www.kipro-pcb.com    in...@kipro-pcb.com

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[Vincent Grennerat]

Hello all,

Here are some answers to your feedbacks:

@Seth: I think we are not at the step of a panel mock-up. First step is probably to check whether some developers of the community want to put some energy on this or not. Hence the workgroup idea I suggested: if we think we have some non-questionnable impact indicators, and it is relevant to have it in KiCad, then we can move forward to the design of the tool.

@Munzo: it is difficult to sum-up in a few lines the probable best strategies to reduce the ecological footprint of PCBs. It is highly interdependent with reliability, lifetime expectancy, modularity etc... As far as the schematic and layout designer is concerned, it can involve the following choices:

- substrate: do I choose a Rogers RO3000 because it has lower HF losses than FR4, or do I accept a bit higher power consumption of my RF Tx chip because I choose FR4 for its lower manufacturing and end-of-life impacts? Probably same question in the near future with bio-substrates which will have lower impact than FR4 but some technological drawbacks.

- Manufacturing process (multilayers, stack-up, micro-vias etc...): designers limit their PCB complexity mainly because of manufacturing cost, but with potential recycling technologies to come (let's remind everyone that currently everything is just burnt, when not ditched!), the ecological impacts will not be proportional to manufacturing cost. Here we have an indicator related to the manufacturing impacts but also to recycling technology. It will probably evolve a lot during the next years, and is probably the most difficult to estimate.

- Copper: the current practice with subtractive tech is "You pay for the copper, leave it on the board!". But removing the maximum of the copper at the manufacturing step (everything that does not have an electrical or thermal function), in compliance with the panelization balancing strategies, could enable a much much shorter circularity loop for copper, which is becoming a more and more critical resource: all the etched copper is highly pure, with low recycling cost (but OK, it slightly increases the manufacturing cost), compared to a potential collect at end-of-life, with costly and very poor recycling yield. Let's also keep in mind that the recycling of the copper at end-of-life is topic.

@Angelo: In the end, the pistachios are not so far from what is currently going on around the more sustainable electronics topic :-) Take a look at the below links. There even was some tries in the past with coconut shells or banana fibres!

JIVA Soluboard: https://www.jivamaterials.com/technology/

DESIRE4EU consortium research: https://desire4eu-eic.eu/state-of-the-art-challenges-and-ambitions/

[jaskij]

I saw the previous emails on the topic but haven't had the time to reply yet.

I've been looking at the PCB calculator, because it has some issues that break my workflow, and am happy to help with panel design. Currently, I'd say the topic is blocked on a decision here: https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/22385#note_2912749088

One thing I'd say is that the idea of endlessly nesting wxBoxSizer with alternating horizontal and vertical layouts leads to bad designs, which are visually unappealing and cause issues with resizing. It's better to use wxGridBagSizer and do a table layout.

Best regards

Jan

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Jan Dorniak
e-mail:jas...@gmail.com