Single-Sided PCB Manufacturing: A Complete Guide What a Single-Sided Board Is A single-sided board carries copper on one face of a rigid laminate and none on the other. Components are mounted on the copper side and their leads pass through drilled holes to be soldered on the same side, which…

PCB Antenna Integration: Keep-Out, Ground Plane and Tuning The Antenna Is Part of the Board An antenna printed on a circuit board is not a component that can be specified and forgotten. Its performance depends on the ground plane beside it, the plastic around it, the battery behind it and…

Double-Sided Rigid-Flex PCB: Design and Build What the Double-Sided Construction Adds A rigid flex board combines rigid sections that carry the components with flexible sections that fold, replacing connectors and cables with copper on polyimide. In a single-sided rigid flex construction the flexible part carries one conductor layer, which limits…

PCB Manufacturing Specification: What to Include Why a Gerber Set Is Not a Specification A Gerber package describes the shape of each layer. It does not say how thick the board is, what the laminate is, how much copper is on each layer, what finish the pads carry, how tight…

Safe PCB Temperature: How Hot Is Too Hot? The Question Behind the Question When an engineer asks what a safe board temperature is, the useful answers are three different numbers. There is the temperature the board may reach without damaging itself, the temperature at which the components on it still…

Stacked Microvias: Design Rules and Reliability What a Microvia Is A microvia is a very small plated hole, conventionally defined as no more than 0.15 millimetres in diameter, that connects two adjacent layers of a board. It is produced by laser drilling rather than by mechanical drilling, because a mechanical…

Radio PCB: Designing for RF and Wireless Links What a Radio Board Has to Do A radio board takes a signal from a digital interface, converts it to a radio frequency, amplifies it and delivers it to an antenna, and it does the reverse on the way in. Every stage…

Camera Module PCB: Design and Manufacturing The Board Inside a Camera Module A camera module is a stack of precision parts: the lens, the holder, the actuator that moves the lens for focus or stabilisation, the image sensor, the filter and the printed circuit board that carries the sensor and…

AI Circuit Board: What Accelerator Hardware Needs What Changes When the Board Carries an Accelerator An artificial intelligence accelerator is a large die that draws a lot of power and moves a lot of data. Neither of those facts is new to board design, but the scale is. A training…

Ultra Thick Copper PCB: Design and Manufacturing Where Ordinary Heavy Copper Stops Copper weight is quoted in ounces per square foot, where one ounce corresponds to about 35 micrometres. Ordinary boards use one or two ounces, heavy copper power boards use four, and the class described as ultra thick starts…