PCB Router Bits: Depaneling Tool Selection and Cut Quality A PCB router bit is a small carbide end mill, usually between 0.8 mm and 2.4 mm in diameter, that cuts the outline of a circuit out of its panel. It looks like an ordinary cutter and behaves like a precision…

Panel Plating vs Pattern Plating: Choosing the Copper Process Every plated through hole board needs copper on the surface and inside the barrel, and there are two established ways to put it there. Panel plating covers the whole panel with copper before the circuit is defined; pattern plating deposits copper…

Mica Board for PCB Tooling: High-Temperature Insulation Properties Mica board is one of the few materials that can sit next to a soldering iron, a hot bar or a reflow fixture and remain an insulator. It is built from mica paper bonded with a silicone resin, and it combines a…

FPC Copper Thickness: Choosing Ounces for Flex and Current Copper thickness is the single parameter that decides what a flexible circuit can do. It sets the current the traces can carry, the heat they can move, the tightest radius the part will bend to and the number of flex cycles…

Vehicle Sensor PCB: Technology, Reliability and Manufacturing A vehicle contains more sensors than any other consumer product, and each of them has to survive an environment that is deliberately hostile. Engine bays reach a hundred and fifty degrees, wheels are exposed to water and salt, and every sensor is connected…

Solder Mask Opening: NSMD vs SMD Pad Design A solder mask opening is the deliberate gap left in the protective coating so that copper can be exposed for soldering, probing or heat transfer. Everything else on the board stays covered, which is what stops the coating from interfering with the…

Direct Bonded Copper PCB: Structure, Materials and Process Power electronics has been pushing against the limits of ordinary boards for two decades. An insulated gate bipolar transistor module that switches several hundred amps produces heat in a volume smaller than a fingernail, and no laminate with an organic dielectric can…

Aluminium Nitride Substrate Metallisation: DPC versus AMB An aluminium nitride substrate is only useful once it has a conductor on it, and the way that conductor is attached decides almost everything about the finished part. The ceramic itself offers a thermal conductivity of one hundred and seventy watts per metre…

GPS Module PCB Assembly: A Complete Guide A positioning module is one of the few components that must receive a signal from a satellite twenty thousand kilometres away while sitting inside a product full of switching supplies and processors. The module itself handles the hard part, but whether it works…

20-Layer PCB Design: Backplanes, Vias and Lamination A 20-layer board is a different class of product from the boards most engineers work with. At that layer count the design is almost always a backplane or a large switch fabric card, where the routing demand comes from dozens of high-speed links…