LED Strip Board Manufacturing: Rigid Bars and Flexible Strips An LED strip is a light source that looks simple and is not. The board carries a line of emitters, a driver, and a return path that has to deliver the same current to the far end of the strip as…

Multilayer PCB Prototype Fabrication: 2 to 48 Layers A multilayer PCB prototype order is a specification before it is a product. Layer count, panel size, drill diameter, copper weight, impedance tolerance and surface finish all have to be stated before the first panel is built, and each of them changes…

IPC Standards for PCB: A Complete Guide IPC standards are the reason a board designed in one country can be fabricated in another and assembled in a third without the parties arguing about what the words mean. They define the requirements for design, for materials, for fabrication and for acceptance,…

PCB Contamination Control: Why Fingerprints Matter A fingerprint looks harmless. On a printed circuit board it is a deposit of skin oils, salts, and fatty acids, and in a fabrication line it is a defect source that shows up several process steps later as oxidation, poor adhesion, or a plating…

78-Layer Orthogonal Backplane PCB: Design and Manufacturing A backplane has always been the largest and most demanding board in a system, and the move to 112G and 224G PAM4 signalling has pushed it into a class of its own. An orthogonal backplane carries the line cards and the switch fabric…

Bluetooth PCB Design: 2.4 GHz Layout and Antenna Matching Bluetooth is a short range link running in a crowded band, and it is usually added to a product that is already small, already powered from a battery and already full of other circuitry. A Bluetooth PCB therefore has to solve…

AS9100 Aerospace PCB: Requirements and Manufacturing In an aircraft or a satellite, a failed board cannot be replaced at a service counter. That single fact drives everything about how an aerospace PCB is specified, manufactured and documented, and it is the reason the industry built a quality standard around the…

High-Speed Backplane PCB Design: A Stage-by-Stage Process A backplane is the board everything else plugs into, and it is designed differently from any other board in the system. Its interfaces are defined by the modules it has to connect rather than by its own function, its mechanical envelope is set…

Injection Molding Machine Control PCB: Current, Heat and Noise An injection molding machine is a hydraulic press with a temperature problem. Its control board has to sequence the clamp, hold several heating zones along the barrel, drive the servo pumps that meter the melt, and read pressure and temperature signals…

Back Drilling PCB Design: Stub Control for High-Speed Vias A via that runs from the top of a board to the bottom carries signal only for the part of its length that the signal actually needs. The remainder is a copper stub hanging off the trace, and at 25 Gb/s…