What Are We Designing in This Course?

Before continuing, you can watch the companion video for this guide. In the video, I explain the design goals and philosophy behind building a custom carrier board for the LattePanda Mu, and how this project balances educational clarity with real-world functionality.

Introduction

In this project, we will design a custom, fully functional carrier board for the LattePanda Mu compute module.
If you have worked with single-board computers such as the Raspberry Pi or NVIDIA Jetson Nano, you already know that the compute module itself is only half the story. It provides the processing power, but it cannot function on its own.

A carrier board is the essential companion that provides power, connectivity, and physical interfaces. It acts as the bridge between the compute module and the outside world, exposing interfaces such as USB, PCIe, HDMI, and Ethernet through standard connectors. In this guide, you will learn how to design such a carrier board from scratch in KiCad 9, following professional schematic, layout, and verification workflows.

Project Overview

The LattePanda Mu is a compact, high-performance x86 compute module based on Intel’s N100 processor. It offers desktop-class performance in a tiny SO-DIMM-style form factor, but it lacks direct power input, display output, or peripheral connections. These are provided by the carrier board that we will design.

An offer from our sponsor

Our design is inspired by the LattePanda Mu Carrier reference design, but it is not a copy. Instead, it is a new, simplified board built from the ground up to be educational, practical, and manufacturable. The goal is twofold:

1. To create a real working board that can be manufactured and used with the LattePanda Mu.
2. To produce an educational design that highlights core PCB design concepts such as power distribution, impedance-controlled routing, and schematic organization.

Design Scope and Subsystems

The board includes all the critical subsystems required to make the LattePanda Mu a complete computer. These include power input and regulation, display output, USB connectivity, Ethernet networking, and GPIO expansion.

Each subsystem illustrates an essential design principle. For example, the power section demonstrates stable rail generation and decoupling practices, while the HDMI and USB subsystems illustrate how to route high-speed differential pairs with impedance control.

Design Simplifications for Learning

To keep the design focused and accessible, several deliberate simplifications were made.
The most notable is the removal of the PCIe x4 interface found in the reference design. PCIe routing adds considerable complexity and board size, making it less suitable for a learning project. By omitting it, we retain all critical high-speed interfaces—USB 3, HDMI, and Ethernet—without unnecessary difficulty.

Every connection, via, and footprint placement in this project has been created manually, with no auto-routing. Each decision—from component placement to trace length—is deliberate and documented, allowing you to see how a professional KiCad workflow develops step by step.

The board outline has also been redesigned for improved routing efficiency and logical organization. Additional GPIO headers were added to increase flexibility for experimentation—an enhancement beyond the original LattePanda Mu Carrier reference design.

Design for Manufacturing (DFM) Verification

Once the schematic and layout were complete, the design was verified using NextPCB’s Design for Manufacturing (DFM) tool.
DFM analysis ensures that the PCB can be fabricated reliably and economically. It checks for issues such as minimum trace spacing, annular ring dimensions, via sizes, solder-mask clearances, and copper exposure.

By running a DFM report, we confirm that the board complies with manufacturing tolerances and can be sent directly to a professional PCB manufacturer.
Understanding and interpreting DFM results is a vital part of every professional PCB design workflow.

Comparison with the LattePanda Reference Design

Our design draws inspiration from the LattePanda Mu Carrier board but simplifies it for educational clarity.
The reference board is fully featured, intended for commercial reliability testing and compliance certification. In contrast, our custom carrier board is optimized for learning—smaller, easier to route, and focused on the core principles of high-speed design, schematic organization, and manufacturability.

Learning Objectives and Outcomes

By the end of this project, you will have completed a full KiCad 9 design workflow for a real high-speed embedded computer board. You will understand how to:

• Create hierarchical schematics with professional organization and documentation.
• Route high-speed interfaces while maintaining impedance and ground-plane integrity.
• Apply best practices for power distribution, decoupling, and copper pour design.
• Verify manufacturability using DFM tools before fabrication.

When finished, you will have a complete KiCad project—including schematic, layout, and Gerber files—ready for fabrication. More importantly, you will gain the confidence and discipline to design any compute-module-based board, whether x86 like the LattePanda Mu or ARM-based like the Raspberry Pi Compute Module series.

Conclusion

In this course, you are not simply replicating a schematic—you are building a real, manufacturable high-speed computer board while learning the theory and reasoning behind every design choice.

By focusing on clarity, professional methods, and DFM verification, you will develop both the technical knowledge and the workflow discipline to succeed in modern PCB engineering. In the next guide, we will explore the LattePanda Mu Carrier reference design in detail, analyzing its schematic organization, stack-up structure, and high-speed routing strategy.

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