PCB Electrical Test Methods: Flying Probe and Grid A finished board that leaves the shop with an undetected open circuit does not simply get scrapped. It travels to the assembly line, collects components, passes through reflow and possibly through in-circuit test, and only then reveals the defect, at which point…

Lamination Voids and Delamination: Causes and Process Control Delamination and lamination voids are the failure modes that pass every electrical test on the day of manufacture and reappear months later as a blister or a lifted pad. They form when the resin in the prepreg does not completely fill the…

PCB Boundary Scan Testing: Talking Through the Chain 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 article explains…

PCB Functional Test Jig: Proving the Board Works Electronics manufacturing has become a discipline of small details. Solder paste volumes, placement accuracy, temperature profiles and inspection limits all add up to the final result. This guide looks at PCB functional test jig from the perspective of a PCBA factory floor,…

Six-Layer Stackup Options: Signal, Ground and Power Layers A six-layer board is the first stack that gives a designer a dedicated ground plane and a dedicated power plane without giving up two routing layers. That is why it has become the default for consumer products, industrial controllers and anything with…

PCB in Circuit Test Fixture: Poking Every Net 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 in circuit test fixture gives you a practical advantage…

Timing Analysis in High-Speed PCB Design Timing analysis is the part of high-speed design that decides whether a bus will actually work, and it is the part most often skipped because it happens before any routing exists. Once an interface runs at hundreds of megabits and the edge rates fall…

8-Layer PCB Prototype Fabrication: Lamination to Copper An eight-layer board is not simply a six-layer stack with two more cores. Once the layer count rises, the fabrication route gains a full lamination cycle, the inner cores must be treated before they are bonded, and the plated barrels become long enough…

PCB Design Workflow: Ten Steps From Schematic to Release Files Board design fails more often from missing inputs than from bad routing. A layout engineer who receives an incomplete schematic, an approximate mechanical drawing, and a verbal description of the stackup will produce a board that matches none of them…

PCB Layout Review: Four Checks Before You Release the Board The review that happens after the routing is finished is the last chance to catch problems before tooling is committed. At that stage the electrical intent is fixed, so the questions shift to whether the board can be built, whether…