When creating libraries, standards are crucial for maintaining consistency, accuracy, and reliability. Yet, even with rigid standards in place, mistakes inevitably creep into such a detail-oriented process. In this talk, we’ll explore some hair-raising footprint horror stories and how to avoid fatal footprint mistakes on your next PCB design. Delving far beyond the basics, we’ll look at the more gnarly errors that trip up engineers. For example, we all know to double-check our pin mappings, but what about how you have interpreted the component’s orientation in the datasheet? Misinterpreting a component’s top view for its bottom view is one of the top causes of bad boards that we see. Drawn from our community of 200,000 engineers, our hope is these lessons will prevent costly prototype iterations and delays on your next project. Finally, we’ll explore how to prevent these errors on your next designs. For example, by bringing in more verification into your processes through checklists or by creating an automated system for assessing the quality of your PCB footprints.