PCB Panelization: Requirements for Assembly and Fabrication PCB panelization is the step that turns a single board design into something a machine can assemble at volume. It decides how many boards fit on a production panel, how they are held in place and where the tooling marks go, and it…

Industrial PCB in SCADA Systems: Architecture and Design A SCADA system is the layer that connects the plant floor to the people who operate it. Remote terminal units and programmable controllers gather measurements from sensors and drive actuators, and the SCADA software presents the result and issues commands. The boards…

Fingerprint Sensor FPC: Design and Assembly Considerations A fingerprint sensor FPC is one of the tightest flexible interconnects in a consumer product, and a fingerprint sensor sits under glass, behind a button or on the back of a phone, and the flexible circuit that connects it carries a dense array…

Flexible PCBA for Foldable Phones: Bend Life and Stack-Up A foldable phone puts a flexible circuit through a mechanical duty cycle that no other consumer product demands. The interconnect that crosses the hinge has to fold and unfold thousands of times over the life of the device, in a space…

Surgical Instrument PCB: Sterilisation and Patient Isolation A surgical instrument is the most demanding environment a circuit board can be placed in. It is sterilised repeatedly, it is handled roughly, it may be in contact with the patient, and a failure during a procedure is not recoverable. A surgical instrument…

PCBA Assembly Tolerance: Standards, Stacks and Process Capability Assembly tolerance on a PCBA is the accumulated variation between where a component should be and where it actually lands, and it is the sum of several independent contributions rather than a single number. When a fine-pitch assembly fails intermittently, the cause…

Solder Paste Stencil: Thickness and Aperture Design A solder paste stencil is a thin metal sheet with apertures cut at the positions of the component pads, and it is the tool that decides how much paste lands on each pad. It is also the least glamorous and most frequently neglected…

Gaming Monitor PCB: A Complete Technical Guide A gaming monitor is a display that has been pushed in one direction further than an office monitor: it must update faster, respond faster and stay accurate while doing so. That single emphasis changes what the board behind the panel has to deliver.…

Smart Environment Monitoring PCB: Design Guide An environment monitoring device is a small, often battery-powered product that has to measure a handful of physical quantities accurately, report them over a wireless link, and run for months or years without attention. Those three requirements pull against each other, and the board…

Metal Stiffener PCB: Reinforcement for Flex Circuits A metal stiffener is a piece of stainless steel or aluminium bonded to a flexible circuit to give it rigidity where rigidity is needed. In the flex PCB world the stiffener is the component that turns a compliant substrate into something that can…