High-Frequency Laminate Selection for RF and Microwave PCBs At radio and microwave frequencies the choice of laminate stops being a cost decision and becomes a performance decision. The dielectric constant sets the physical dimensions of every transmission line, and the loss tangent determines how far a signal travels before it…

RF PCB Layout: Partitioning and Isolation Measures That Work RF layout is where a design that simulates correctly either becomes a working product or becomes a receiver that hears its own transmitter. The difficulties are rarely subtle: a digital section that shares a supply with an analog front end, a…

RF Circuit PCB Design: Printed Elements, Materials, and Stackup Radio frequency design returns to PCB engineering whenever a product needs a wireless link, a radar front end, or a transmission line with a defined impedance. Engineers trained on digital systems usually recognise the components but not the reasoning: an RF…

PCB Palladium Plating for Connectors: Replacing the Nickel Buyers and engineers often focus on the finished product and forget the production line behind it. In practice, most field failures can be traced back to process decisions made during assembly. Understanding PCB palladium plating for connectors gives you a practical advantage…

PCB Silver Immersion Finish: A Finish for Solder and Speed Modern electronics depend on boards that are assembled correctly the first time. Every product – a phone, a charger, a medical instrument or an industrial controller – relies on thousands of solder joints that must conduct current for years. This…

Band-Pass Filter Bode Plots: Reading Resonance on the Bench A band-pass filter is one of the first circuits an engineer meets, and one of the easiest to misread. Its behaviour is fully described by a transfer function, and the standard way to visualise that function is a Bode plot: a…

Can a PCB Carry 100 A? PCB Current Capacity in Copper Most boards never see more than a couple of amperes. Consumer electronics typically run below 2 A continuously, and even a dense industrial board rarely exceeds 5 A or 10 A on any one net. Then a motor drive…

Additive Process in PCB Manufacturing: Design Notes Subtractive processes have defined printed circuit board fabrication for decades: copper is etched away and solder mask is applied, exposed and developed. An additive process builds the coating where it is needed instead of removing what is not. That change sounds like a…

Flexible Circuit Board Soldering: Method and Precautions Flexible circuits tolerate heat and mechanical stress differently from rigid boards, and the same technique that produces a clean joint on FR-4 can lift a pad from a polyimide film. The sequence below covers flexible circuit board soldering of a fine-pitch device and…

PCB Gold Thickness Measurement on Pads: How Much Gold Is There Modern electronics depend on boards that are assembled correctly the first time. Every product – a phone, a charger, a medical instrument or an industrial controller – relies on thousands of solder joints that must conduct current for years.…