Battery PCBA: Protection, Balancing and Safety What a Battery Board Does A lithium cell is an excellent energy store with a narrow band of conditions in which it is safe. Exceed the upper voltage and it degrades and can vent; go below the lower limit and the cell is damaged;…

Thermal Conductive Laminate: A Metal Core Alternative The Gap Between FR-4 and Metal Core An ordinary FR-4 board conducts heat at around 0.3 watts per metre kelvin, which is why a hot component on a FR-4 board heats only the copper and the few square millimetres around it. A metal…

Protel PCB: A Practical Guide for Beginners What Protel Is Protel is a family of printed circuit board design tools that originated in Australia in the late 1980s and grew into one of the most widely used packages in the industry. For a generation of engineers, learning PCB design meant…

Fibreglass PCB: Why FR-4 Still Dominates What a Fibreglass Board Is The material at the heart of most circuit boards is a sheet of woven glass fabric impregnated with epoxy resin. The glass gives it mechanical strength, dimensional stability and a low absorption of moisture; the resin binds the fibres,…

Through-Hole PCB Assembly Cost: What Drives It Why Through-Hole Assembly Costs More Than SMT A surface mount joint is made by a machine that places a component and an oven that solders a thousand joints at once. A through-hole joint is made by inserting a lead into a hole and…

Single-Sided vs Multilayer Flex PCB: Which to Choose The Choice That Sets the Whole Project A flexible circuit is specified for a reason, usually that the product has to fold, bend or conform to a shape. Once that is decided, the next question is the layer count, and it is…

Rogers 3010 PCB: The High-Dk Material Explained A Material Chosen for Its Dielectric Constant Most laminate decisions are made on temperature, cost and loss. Rogers 3010 is chosen for a different reason: it has a dielectric constant of about 10.2, which is more than twice that of ordinary FR-4 and…

PCB Miniaturisation: Principles, Limits and Cost What Miniaturisation Means in Practice Miniaturising a board means fitting the same circuit into less area, less thickness or less weight, without giving up performance. It is not one technique but a set of them applied together, and the useful ones depend on what…

How Much Does It Cost to Build a PCB Factory? What the Question Really Asks Building a printed circuit board factory is a capital project with three distinct cost blocks: the initial investment to build and equip the plant, the monthly cost of running it, and the working capital needed…

Connected Device PCB: Design for Wireless Products What Makes a Connected Board Different A connected device is one that talks to something else, whether over Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, Thread, LoRa or a cellular network. The circuit board inside it is not fundamentally different from any other board, but three requirements…