Troubleshooting Fine Pitch Solder Bridging on an SMT Line After reflow, the optical inspection keeps flagging the same area of a batch of display driver boards. Under magnification, the cause is visible: a row of solder bridging between adjacent leads of one fine pitch device. The immediate response is to…

From Pilot Build to Volume SMT: What Must Be Frozen The first twenty boards are finished, the customer has adjusted the firmware, and one driver chip was replaced because it went out of stock. The order is now five hundred boards. The natural question is whether the same production files…

Starting a PCB Design Career as a New Graduate PCB layout is one of the few hardware specialities where a new graduate can be productive quickly and where progress afterwards is slow unless it is planned. The entry requirements are concrete, the work is measurable, and the ceiling is high…

Should You Attend Training Before Applying for a Hardware Design Job? Every graduation season the same decision appears for students of electronics, automation and communications: apply directly, or spend several months on training first. For anyone aiming at hardware design the question matters more than for most roles, because the…

Why Hardware Design Is Not a Short Course Advertisements promising a hardware engineer in ninety days or a complete designer in three months are attractive for an obvious reason: the alternative is slow. The difficulty is that the slow path is the one that produces an engineer whose work survives…

Choosing a Circuit Design Partner for a New Product The failure modes of a product development project are predictable enough to be listed: the schedule slips, the design has to be redone after the prototype, and the finished design cannot be manufactured at the cost the business case assumed. All…

Is That PCB Factory Reliable? Signals Worth Checking Every buyer of boards wants the same three things: the board that arrives matches the data that was sent, the date that was promised is the date that is met, and any problem is reported rather than discovered. Whether a particular shop…

Screening a Contract Assembler: A Purchasing and Engineering Checklist Screening a contract assembler is a different exercise from comparing prices, and it is usually split between two people who ask different questions. Purchasing wants to know what the order will cost and when it will arrive. Engineering wants to know…

Choosing a PCB Fabricator for Prototypes and Pilot Runs Choosing a PCB fabricator for a prototype is usually treated as a purchasing decision, made by comparing the price on two websites. For a simple double-sided board that is the right approach, because the fabrication is standard and the differences are…

Small Batch SMT Assembly: What Separates a Good Factory At small volumes the choice of assembly partner matters more than the price. A few dozen boards look like a low-risk order, and the temptation is to take the cheapest quotation. What usually follows is a batch with poor joints, shifted…