Alumina Ceramic PCB Manufacturing The Workhorse of Ceramic Boards When a laminate can no longer take the temperature, the voltage or the heat flux, the design moves to a ceramic substrate. Among the ceramics, alumina is the one used most widely, because it combines a useful thermal conductivity with excellent…

Semiflex PCB Manufacturing The Middle Ground Between Rigid and Flexible Rigid boards are cheap and stable but cannot be folded into a tight enclosure. Flexible and rigid flex boards solve that problem but bring the cost and process complexity of polyimide, coverlay and stiffeners with them. Semiflex sits between the…

Aluminum Nitride Substrate PCB When Alumina Is Not Enough Ceramic substrates have long been the answer where a laminate cannot take the temperature or the heat flux. Alumina is the traditional choice because it is inexpensive, well understood and electrically excellent, but its thermal conductivity is modest. As power densities…

Consumer Electronics PCB Manufacturing Cost, Speed and Quality at the Same Time A consumer product competes on price, reaches the market on a schedule and is expected to work for the life of the device without complaint. The board inside it has to satisfy all three of those pressures at…

Surgical Instrument PCB Manufacturing A Board That Goes Into the Operating Room A surgical instrument is used close to the patient and in some cases inside the body, and the electronics that control it have to survive sterilisation, fluids, vibration and repeated handling while remaining accurate. The board inside an…

UPS PCB Manufacturing Power That Cannot Be Interrupted An uninterruptible power supply exists for the moment when everything else fails, which means it has to work on the one day it is needed rather than the day it was tested. Inside the unit, the board manages the conversion from alternating…

BGA Ball Placement Service Cost Why Ball Placement Matters As packages have moved to higher input and output counts and finer pitches, the ball array under a device has become one of the most demanding features of an assembly. Ball grid arrays, chip scale packages and flip chip devices all…

PCB Design Cost Breakdown Design Is a Small Line Item With a Large Lever The engineering effort that goes into a board is usually a modest fraction of what the product costs to build over its life, but it is the part that decides how much everything else costs. A…

High Speed PCB Cost Breakdown Why the Price Jumps A high speed board is not simply a board with more layers. What makes it expensive is the discipline the signal requires: the laminate has to hold its dielectric properties at the frequencies in use, the trace geometry has to be…

Vehicle Sensor PCB Manufacturing Sensors Decide the Vehicle Behaviour A modern vehicle makes most of its decisions from sensor data. Temperature and pressure readings drive engine management, radar, camera and lidar modules feed driver assistance, inertial sensors track the vehicle’s motion, and current and voltage sensing keeps the battery within…