Electronic Design Technician

Skills at this level

Schematic capture and PCB layout

— Captures circuits and lays out printed circuit boards in EDA tools such as OrCAD and Altium Designer, balancing signal integrity, power distribution, and footprint/symbol library management.

SPICE circuit simulation

— Runs and interprets circuit simulations directly from the schematic environment in PSpice/SPICE, including mixed-signal cases, to validate design concepts and compare against bench measurements.

HDL / FPGA design flow

— Sets up and executes the FPGA build flow — VHDL/Verilog synthesis, place-and-route, and timing analysis on Xilinx and Altera platforms — to bring up and validate programmable-logic prototypes.

Embedded systems bring-up

— Wires, programs, and debugs embedded test rigs built on ARM, Microblaze, or Nios processors and real-time operating systems to support hardware validation.

Prototype assembly and rework

— Populates, solders, reworks, and wires prototype boards and subassemblies, and prepares them for controlled bench testing.

Bench measurement and troubleshooting

— Sets up lab instruments and test fixtures to measure circuit behavior, isolates faults to component, connection, or fixture, and records results into the test log.

Regulatory compliance testing

— Runs design verification and EMC pre-compliance test sequences against UL, FCC, CE, and IEC standards and assembles the supporting evidence for engineer sign-off.

DFM/DFT support

— Reviews layouts and builds for manufacturability and testability, working with manufacturing and suppliers to adapt the fabrication and test handoff for standard and non-standard builds.

Component library and BOM management

— Creates and maintains footprint/symbol libraries, design rules, and bills of materials, reconciling vendor part numbers and substitutions with purchasing and stockroom.

Test documentation

— Compiles measured and simulated data into structured test reports and specification documents following the group's documentation format and revision control.

Test automation scripting

— Writes MATLAB and Python routines to drive bench instruments and post-process measurement data for characterizing designs that manual methods cannot capture reliably.

Technical communication

— Conveys build status, test findings, and procedure changes clearly to design engineers, manufacturing, and less experienced technicians, both orally and in writing.