Drone PCB Design: Weight, Vibration and Power A drone is a flying vibration environment with a battery attached. Every design decision on its board is weighed against mass, and the board must simultaneously survive continuous vibration, deliver tens of amps to the motors and keep a radio link working next…

PCB Trace Design: Types, Materials, and Width Rules Every circuit is only as good as the copper that connects it. A PCB trace carries both power and signal, and its geometry decides whether a design performs as intended or behaves differently on every board. The parameters involved, width, spacing, copper…

Battery PCBA: Protection, Gauging and Balancing A battery PCBA is the small board that sits between the cells and the rest of the product and decides whether the battery is used safely. It protects the cells from over-current and over-discharge, measures how much energy remains, balances the cells against each…

Aerospace PCB: Design and Reliability Requirements An aerospace PCB is not simply a well made circuit board. It is a board that has been designed, qualified and documented to survive an environment that punishes every weak point at once: wide temperature swings, sustained vibration, low air pressure, humidity and, in…

PCB Fabrication Specifications: What to Put on the Drawing Most fabrication problems are specification problems. A board that is electrically correct can still be unusable because the copper weight was never stated, the impedance requirement appeared only in an email, or the outline tolerance was left to the fabricator to…

Button PCB: Membrane Switches, Domes and Contact Design A button PCB is the part of a product the user touches most often and the part most likely to be designed last. It carries the switch contacts, the light guides for backlighting and often the entire membrane assembly, and its reliability…

AI Hardware PCB Design: Power, Memory and High-Speed Interfaces Boards that run inference or training workloads are built around a small number of extremely demanding components. An AI accelerator, its memory and its power delivery network together set requirements that dominate the layout, and everything else on the board has…

Air Conditioner PCB: Design, Failure Modes and Repair An air conditioner board is a study in hostile conditions. It lives beside a compressor, switches high current, is exposed to condensation, dust and temperature extremes, and is expected to run for a decade with occasional service. Its design reflects each of…

Energy Storage PCB Design Guide Boards that sit next to a battery pack are designed against a different set of rules from ordinary control electronics. The voltage may be low but the current is not, the failure mode of the assembly is a fire rather than a lost signal, and…

Radio PCB Design: Layout Rules for RF Boards A radio board is judged by measurements that are invisible on a schematic. Sensitivity, spurious emission, phase noise and harmonic content all depend on the physical layout of the copper, and a design that simulates correctly can still fail compliance testing because…