Building High Voltage Boards: Insulation, Slots and Hi-Pot Different Rules, Different Failure Mode A high voltage board does not fail the way a digital board fails. A marginal signal trace produces an intermittent error; a marginal high voltage trace produces a breakdown, a tracking path along the laminate surface or…

Hard Gold Connector Contacts: Plating, Bevel and Wear The Interface That Has to Survive Insertion A gold finger is a row of hard gold plated contacts along the edge of a board that slides into an edge connector. PCIe cards, memory modules, GPU and FPGA boards, server backplanes, industrial control…

Fuel Pump Driver Board: Design and Assembly Guide A Board That Lives Under the Hood A fuel pump control module regulates the voltage and current delivered to the pump instead of running it at full power all the time. That saves fuel, improves throttle response and helps emissions compliance. Inside…

V-Cut Scoring PCB Cost and Design Guide How a Board Becomes a Panel Almost no board is manufactured one at a time. Small and medium boards are arranged several to a panel so that the fabricator and the assembly line can handle them efficiently, and the panel then has to…

Copper Based PCB Price: Cost Structure and Drivers A Substrate Chosen for Heat and Current A copper based board replaces the FR-4 core with a solid copper plate. The dielectric above it is a thin thermally conductive insulator, and the circuit layer sits on top. Copper conducts heat at roughly…

Taconic PCB Manufacturing: Materials and Process Guide When FR-4 Stops Being Enough Below a few gigahertz, FR-4 is a reasonable substrate and the cost advantage is enormous. Above roughly 6 GHz the picture changes: dissipation factor starts to dominate insertion loss, dielectric constant drifts with frequency and temperature, and copper…

Telecom PCB Price Guide: Materials, Layers and Volume Why Telecom Boards Sit in Their Own Price Band A telecom board is not simply a large digital board. It usually carries a mix of high speed serial links, a microwave or RF section, a dense power distribution network and a backplane…

Medical Device PCB Price Comparison: China vs Global Price Is the Easy Part of a Medical Board A medical device PCB is specified differently from any other board. The laminate has to be traceable, the process has to be documented, the acceptance criteria follow IPC Class 3, and the supplier…

CCTV Camera PCB Manufacturing Price Guide Four Boards in One Housing A modern surveillance camera is not one circuit board. There is an image sensor board, a main processor board that carries the SoC, memory and network interface, a power board that produces the rails and often drives IR illumination,…

SMT Stencil Cost: Laser Cut vs Chemically Etched The Cheapest Part of the Assembly, and the Most Influential A stencil is a sheet of stainless steel or nickel with apertures that match the pads on the board. Paste is printed through it, components are placed on the paste, and the…