Electronic design automation is a common technique used by circuit board designers to design the layouts of a circuit board in the industrial electronics design field. The benefit of using this technology is that it stores all the information related to the design and makes it possible to make changes during the design process and even performs the tasks that have to be performed more than once.

To begin a design process, the designer has to first convert the diagram into a net list which comprises of the connectors, pins and circuit nodes. The diagram is then imported into the circuit board layout program. The second task would be to position the devices according to the diagram. This is done with the help of the software which will assign the first pin of each device to a specific grid location in the diagram. The designer/ operator should command the software as to which regions of the circuit board they want the device to go into.

After all the devices are connected to their respective locations in the circuit, the software makes use of templates from the footprint library to create a pin list for the printed circuit board. The pin list so created helps the designer to find the exact location of a device's pins along with a pad and drill hole layout for each device. Though in most cases, the software is used to automatically mark the net lists, in rare cases, the net lists have to be marked manually by the circuit board designer. After the task is performed, the software will employ a set of subroutines which will help reduce the overall production cost of the printed circuit board.