Medical Monitoring PCBA Project Intake Checklist When a medical monitoring board moves from a prototype to a small production batch, the attention usually goes to the price and the date, and the programme, the test and the material revision are confirmed later if at all. What then appears after the…

HDI Fabrication: Stacked and Staggered Blind Vias As products become thinner and smaller, an ordinary through hole board runs out of routing space. The answer that HDI fabrication provides is to drill vias that do not pass through the whole construction: a blind via reaches from an outer layer to…

Soldering Anomaly Investigation on an LED Driver Board An LED driver board can pass a visual inspection and then show a local temperature rise, an unstable output or a difference between boards from the same batch when the customer tests it. Replacing the power device is the common reaction and…

High Speed PCB Design for DDR, PCIe and USB 3.0 As product performance rises, high speed interfaces have moved from specialist designs into ordinary ones. A memory bus, a serial expansion link or a fast USB port appears on boards that would not have had one a few years ago,…

Turnkey SMT Service With Component Procurement Buying the components and getting the board assembled are two separate problems that both consume attention. The parts have to be sourced from a supplier that can be trusted, the prices compared, the material verified, and the assembly then has to be tracked through…

IoT Terminal Development From Hardware to Cloud Adding a communication module to a board does not make a connected product. An IoT terminal has to acquire data reliably, decide what to send and when, keep working on a battery for months or years, survive a network that is sometimes absent,…

Small Batch SMT Assembly With Fast Changeover During development and the pilot stage a customer usually needs a small quantity assembled for functional verification, for testing, or for a limited release into the market. The requirements are not the same as those of a volume order: what matters is how…

Medical Electronics Development and Certification Support Medical equipment places demands on a design that consumer products do not. The function has to be correct, but it also has to be safe for the person using it, immune to interference from everything around it, and stable over years rather than months.…

High Frequency Board Manufacturing on Rogers Material Fifth generation mobile networks, satellite links, millimetre wave radar and automotive radar have pushed high frequency circuit boards from a specialist item into a mainstream requirement. A high frequency board differs from an ordinary FR4 board in the material, in the processing and…

HDI Design With 1 to 4 Order Blind and Buried Vias Phones, tablets, wearables and high end industrial modules all rely on high density interconnect boards to fit the routing into the space available. Designing one is harder than designing an ordinary multilayer board, because the stack-up, the via strategy,…