PCB Debugging a New Board: Tools, Flow and Soldering A new board rarely works the first time it is powered, and the difference between a project that recovers in a day and one that loses a week is usually the debugging method rather than the fault. Bring-up on a fresh…

Lead-Free SMT PCB Design: Materials, Pads and Compatibility Lead-free assembly has been the default for consumer and industrial electronics for years, yet the design rules that support it are still applied inconsistently. A lead-free SMT PCB design is not simply a board assembled with a different alloy. The higher process…

Four-Layer PCB Design: From Schematic Capture to Routing A four-layer board is the first stackup that gives a designer a real ground plane, and the first where the order of the workflow starts to matter. On a two-layer board the layout can be adjusted almost indefinitely without changing the electrical…

High-Speed PCB Layout: 20 Practical Questions Answered High-speed layout questions come up again and again because the answers depend on frequency, geometry and the behaviour of the return current rather than on a fixed rule. The twenty points below are the ones engineers ask most often, answered as briefly as…

PCB Design Workflow: From Netlist to Final Layout Schematic capture exists for a practical reason: it produces the netlist that the board layout is built from and establishes the basis for everything that follows. Once the netlist is available, the layout work itself is a sequence of decisions that run…

Via Drilling in Prototype Boards: Through, Blind and Buried Drilling is one of the largest single cost elements in a prototype order, and the type of hole chosen determines not only the price but the number of lamination cycles the panel has to survive. Understanding the three via types and…

Control Board Layout: Placement and Decoupling Rules A control board carries the processor, its memory, the interfaces and the power conversion, and its layout determines whether the product is reliable or merely functional. The rules below are the ones that matter most on this class of board, where a microcontroller…

High Speed Routing Questions: Vias, Decoupling and Planes The same questions come up on almost every high-speed layout, and the answers are more consistent than the variety of the questions suggests. What follows is a set of the recurring ones, with the reasoning behind each answer rather than a rule…

PCB Prototype Manufacturing: From Design Data to Tested Board A prototype board exists to answer a question before the answer costs a production run. It allows the design to be tested, the errors to be found and corrected, and the assumptions in the schematic to be checked against physical reality.…

Substrate Quality Problems in PCB Laminate Production Dimension changes on a finished board usually begin long before the finished board exists. They start in the substrate, in the way it was cut, stored, pressed and handled, and they appear later as misregistration, warpage or a stackup that does not match…