Ground Design in Electronic Equipment: Types and Rules Ground is the least glamorous net on any schematic and the one most often responsible for a product that works on the bench and misbehaves in the field. Good ground design serves two purposes, and it is worth stating them plainly: it…

PCB Grounding of A Shielded Can: Where the Shield Returns 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 grounding of a shielded can gives you…

Underfill for Chip Scale Packages: When and How Chip-scale assembly has blurred a boundary that used to be neat. Flip chip and chip scale packages sit directly on the board, and the traditional separation between the semiconductor die, its package and the assembly process has largely disappeared. The advantage in…

PCB Gasket Selection for Enclosures: Sealing the Join 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 gasket selection for enclosures from the perspective of a PCBA factory…

Board Bring-Up: Debugging a Newly Assembled PCB A newly assembled board is a hypothesis, not a product. Debugging it is straightforward when the board is small and miserable when it is large and densely populated, because there are too many possible faults to test one at a time. A disciplined…

PCB Board Level Shielding Attach: Placing the Can 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…

Fourteen Traits of a High Reliability PCB At a glance, two boards can look identical and behave completely differently. The difference is in details that are invisible from above — plating thickness, laminate consistency, mask quality, process discipline — and it becomes visible only in service, when one product runs…

PCB Solderless Press Fit Reliability: A Joint That Does Not Melt 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 solderless press fit reliability gives you…

FPC Assembly: SMT Process Requirements on Flexible Boards Placing surface mount devices on a flexible circuit is not the same operation as placing them on a rigid board, and treating them as equivalent is how a flexible assembly acquires defects that only appear after bending. The differences are mechanical before…

Multiphysics Simulation in Automotive Electronics Design There is an old division of labour in vehicle engineering: the mechanical engineer designs the machine, the electronics engineer designs the navigation system, and the civil engineer designs the road. Each discipline worked independently. That separation is no longer practical, because a modern product…