Repeat Order Assembly of an Industrial Robot Control Board After a prototype has been verified, the usual next step is to order the same board again in a larger quantity. It looks like a matter of adding a zero to the quantity, but three things have often changed in between:…

Volume Assembly of an Automotive Body Controller Board A body controller board carries a main controller, a communication transceiver, a protected supply circuit, relays and several connectors. When a project like this is prepared for volume, the useful conversation does not start with the date the line can run. It…

Micro Main Board Assembly for Wearable Devices The main board in a wearable device fits in a small area and still has to carry a processor, sensors, memory, power management, charging contacts and a board to board connector. For a project like this the question is not only whether the…

Automotive Electronics Development to Automotive Grade Standards The share of electronics in a vehicle keeps rising, from body control modules to intelligent cabins, from battery management to domain controllers, and the requirements have risen with it. A part that goes into a car is not a consumer part with a…

Signal Anomaly Investigation on a Data Acquisition Board A data acquisition board can pass placement and visual inspection and then show a drifting zero, excessive noise, or readings that differ between channels. Replacing the amplifier, the converter or the reference is the usual first reaction and usually the wrong one,…

SMT Prototype Service for Design Verification Boards During development an engineer needs a small number of boards quickly, to find out whether the design works. Hand soldering is slow, and for a 01005 component or a ball grid array it cannot produce a joint that is worth trusting. A proper…

Rigid-Flex PCB Manufacturing and Bend Area Design A rigid-flex board combines a rigid printed circuit board with a flexible circuit in one construction. The rigid sections carry the components and provide the mechanical support, while the flexible sections connect between them and allow the assembly to be folded into the…

BGA Fan-Out Design at 0.4mm Pitch Ball grid array packages have become the standard for high performance devices, from processors and programmable logic to memory, because they allow the pin count to grow without the package growing with it. Designing a board for one is harder than designing for a…

BGA Assembly and SPI Inspection on an Edge Computing Board An edge computing board packs a controller, memory, power management, high speed interfaces and a communication module onto one board, and the pads vary widely in size and spacing between one region and the next. For work like this the…

Impedance Control Design Flow From Simulation to Layout In a high speed digital or radio frequency design, the impedance along a trace is not a detail that can be left to the fabricator. The characteristic impedance of the transmission line has to be designed, and a mismatch produces reflections, ringing…