PCB Design Requirements Across Medical, Automotive and Industrial Electronics The same designer can produce a board for a blood pressure monitor and a board for a solar inverter, but not by applying the same rules. PCB design requirements shift with the industry, because each domain is governed by a different…

Consumer Electronics Solution Development for Smart Devices Developing a consumer electronics product is not the same exercise as developing an industrial one, even when the electronics are comparable. A consumer product is measured against a cost target that has been set by the market rather than by the bill of…

PCB Quality System: Certification, Inspection and Traceability PCB fabrication is a long process. Between the cutting of the panel and the dispatch of the finished board there are dozens of operations, and a problem in any one of them can follow the board all the way to the customer. That…

Placing 01005 Components: Package Range and Process Control Consumer products keep getting smaller, and the packages on the board keep shrinking with them. The journey from 0805 and 0603 through 0402 to 0201 is familiar, and 01005 is now a routine choice in wearable and compact products rather than an…

Solution Development Across Medical, Automotive and Industrial Products Experience in a domain is not a marketing claim; it changes what the first draft of a schematic looks like. A medical product, an automotive module, an industrial controller and a battery powered sensor share the same basic building blocks, and yet…

Polarity Component Orientation and Reverse Placement Control A reversed component is almost never the fault of the placement machine. Integrated circuits, diodes, tantalum capacitors and some light emitting diodes all have a defined mounting direction, and when one of them is placed the wrong way round the consequences range from…

Smart Home Gateway PCBA Assembly and Module Test A smart home gateway is not an ordinary control board. It has to connect sensors, switches, locks, lighting and other terminals, so the board carries a processor, memory, a communication module, a network connector, the power conversion and an antenna interface at…

PCB Fabrication Lead Time: Standard and Expedited Schedules A PCB fabrication lead time only means something when the board type, the process and the quantity are attached to it. A two layer prototype and a ten layer board with buried vias are not on the same clock, so a single…

Security Camera Main Board PCBA Assembly A camera main board has to handle three things at once: the image, the network and the power. It carries a processor, memory, the network interface, the power conversion, the image sensor interface and the control circuit for the infra-red illumination, and the assembly…

Drone Flight Controller PCBA Assembly and Sensor Test A drone flight controller board is compact and carries a large number of direction sensitive devices: the processor, the inertial sensors, the barometric sensor, memory, a crystal, the power section and several connectors. The packages are small and closely spaced, and some…