Computer PCB Design: Layer Count and High-Speed Demands The boards inside computing equipment span an enormous range. A desktop motherboard, a server blade, a solid-state drive controller and a graphics card are all computer PCBs, yet their layer counts, materials and constraints differ completely. What they share is that the…

Castellated PCB: Half-Hole Modules for Board-to-Board Assembly Small radio modules have a recognisable shape: a rectangular board with a row of half-round plated holes along each edge. Those half-holes are the connector, and they are what allow a module to be soldered directly onto a larger board without a socket,…

Bluetooth Keyboard PCB: Matrix, Antenna and Power Budget A wireless keyboard spends most of its life asleep and most of its cost on the radio. The board inside it has to read a key matrix without consuming power, wake the radio when a key is pressed, drive an antenna that…

Round LED PCB: Design and Manufacturing Guide LED lighting is one of the few applications where the circuit board is a functional part of the product rather than a container for it. The board carries the current, conducts the heat away from the emitters and determines the shape of the…

Motion Sensor PCB: Sensors, Layout, and Power Budget Automatic lighting, security cameras, gesture control, and industrial safety systems all depend on the same underlying function: noticing that something moved. The board that does the noticing is built differently from a power or control board, because it has to sense a…

Drone PCB Cost: What Drives the Price of Flight Controller Boards Drone PCB cost is shaped by constraints that have nothing to do with the circuit: weight, vibration, thermal extremes and a very small available volume. A flight controller board is usually 30 to 50 millimetres square and carries a…

Video Recorder PCB: Design for High Speed Video Capture A video recorder board is a small system that happens to be shaped like a circuit board. It has to capture a high bandwidth data stream from an image sensor or a video decoder, process it, buffer it, write it to…

Laptop PCB Design: Layer Count, Space and Thermal Limits A laptop main board is one of the densest products in consumer electronics. It carries a processor with a thousand or more connections, a memory interface running at multi-gigabit rates, several high-speed serial links to the display and the storage, a…

PCB Traces: Structure, Materials and Design Rules A trace is a copper conductor manufactured by etching away everything around it, and its shape is the whole of its electrical behaviour. Width, thickness, length and the distance to its reference plane determine resistance, inductance, impedance and how much it disturbs its…

WiFi PCB and Bluetooth PCB: What Changes in the Layout Wireless products look similar on the schematic but behave very differently on the board. A WiFi PCB works in a wide channel with high throughput and strict emission limits, while a Bluetooth PCB works in a narrow band at much…