ESP32 PCB Design: Layers, RF Layout and Antenna Clearance A board built around an ESP32 looks simple in the block diagram and behaves very differently in the layout. It carries a radio, a fast digital core and a switch mode supply on a board that is often smaller than a…

IoT PCB Copper Thickness: Choosing 0.5 oz or 2 oz Copper thickness is the parameter that quietly sets how much current a board can carry, how well it sheds heat and how much it costs, and on a small IoT board it is decided almost by accident. The designer chooses…

Standard 2-Layer PCB Thickness: 0.8, 1.0 and 1.6 mm Thickness is one of the first numbers a buyer fixes and one of the last to be reconsidered, even though it drives mechanical stiffness, thermal behaviour, impedance geometry and price at the same time. On a two layer board the choice…

PCB Manufacturing Defects: Causes and Prevention Every fabrication process has failure modes, and the useful thing about PCB manufacturing defects is that almost all of them are predictable. They cluster around a small number of physical mechanisms, they are visible under the right inspection, and they respond to specific process…

BGA Soldering: Voids, Reflow Profile and Inspection BGA soldering is the point at which the package stops being a part you can inspect with your eyes and becomes a set of joints you have to trust. The balls are underneath the body, the pitch is fine, and the process window…

LVDS Routing Rules for High Speed Differential Pairs LVDS, or low voltage differential signalling, is a low swing differential technique that carries data at several hundred megabits per second over a printed pair or a balanced cable. Its small voltage swing and low drive current give it low noise and…

Solderability, Warpage and Layout as Causes of Soldering Defects A solder defect is rarely a soldering problem. The joint that opens, the fillet that never forms and the part that lifts are usually decided before the board reaches the oven, by the state of the copper, the flatness of the…

PCB Thermal Design: Keeping Component Temperatures Under Control Heat is the quiet failure mode of modern electronics. A board that passes every electrical test on the bench can still fail in the field because a regulator, a power amplifier or an FPGA runs hot enough to shorten its own life…

PCB Key Metrics: Warpage, Copper Thickness and Impedance Three numbers decide whether a finished panel behaves the way the design intended: how flat it stayed, how much copper is actually on the traces, and what impedance the controlled traces present. Each is quoted on a drawing, each is measured in…

Multilayer PCB Prototype Fabrication Flow A multilayer prototype is not a smaller version of a production run. It is a test of the design data, of the fabricator and of the design rules, and it is built by the same sequence of operations that a production panel will follow. Knowing…