Selecting a PCB Design Partner for Automotive Electronics Choosing a PCB design partner is a decision about schedule and risk rather than about price alone. The teams that look equivalent on a quotation page are rarely equivalent on a project: the difference shows up in whether the layout survives its…

EV Charger Display Board: Fine Pitch Connector Assembly An EV charger display board carries the interface the user actually touches: the screen, the keys, the status indicators and the communications that link them to the controller. Behind that front panel sit the MCU, the memory, the communications devices and one…

EV Charging Gun Lock Board: Motor and Position Feedback Testing A charging gun lock board has to do two things at once: drive a geared motor between the locked and unlocked positions, and report back that the mechanism actually arrived. A board that powers up, accepts its programme and lights…

First Article Approval: What It Confirms Before Production The first article approval is the point at which the production setup is confirmed against the product, and it is the cheapest defect-removal mechanism in the whole process. Everything that is wrong at that moment is still cheap: a stencil can be…

Process Capability Upgrades for Volume Electronics Assembly When a product moves from a small batch into a programme that runs for months, the process that produced an acceptable first batch is often not the process that will produce a consistent thousandth. Process capability is the property that has to change,…

High Frequency Material Selection for Multilayer Boards The choice of laminate for a multilayer board used to be a decision about the operating temperature and the cost. For boards carrying high speed interfaces it has become an electrical decision, because the material contributes a measurable part of the total loss…

Fabricating High Layer Count Boards from Twenty to Forty Layers Above twenty layers, board fabrication stops behaving like an enlarged version of an ordinary process and starts behaving like a different one. The reason is cumulative: every additional pair of layers adds a lamination cycle, and every lamination cycle adds…

What Drives PCB Design Cost: Scope, Time and Revisions Two quotations for the same board can differ by a factor of two, and the difference is almost never in the hourly rate. PCB design cost follows from the scope of the work, the engineering time the scope actually consumes and…

How to Evaluate a PCB Design Company Selecting a PCB design company is a decision that is difficult to reverse, because the design data, the conventions used to produce it and the reasoning behind the choices all live with the supplier. Changing supplier part way through a project is possible…

AI Server Demand and Supply Chain Pressure on Board Fabrication The demand created by accelerated computing has changed the market for high performance boards more in a few years than the previous decade did. A product that uses a large number of high layer count boards, each with a low…