Stepped Substrate Impedance Matching for Millimetre-Wave Boards As frequencies move into the millimetre-wave range, board construction stops being uniform. A design may transition from a very thin core to a standard laminate, from one dielectric constant to another, or from a package substrate down onto the board through an interposer.…

PCB Shipping Protection: Getting It There Intact 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 shipping protection from the perspective of a PCBA factory floor, covering packing…

Padless Via Design for High-Density Interconnect Every via in a conventional board carries a pad: a ring of copper around the drilled hole that exists to absorb the tolerance between where the hole was drilled and where the circuit expects it. That ring is a design compromise, and at high…

High-Speed FPGA PCB Design: Stack-Up, Power and SerDes A modern high-speed FPGA is not a component that gets placed on a board; it is a system that imposes requirements on everything around it. Transceiver lanes run at tens of gigabits per second, the device may present dozens of them, and…

PCB Moisture Sensitivity Handling: Baking Before Use 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 moisture sensitivity handling from the perspective of a PCBA factory floor, covering…

Eight DFM Principles for PCBA Assembly Design rules for assembly are not a list of prohibitions. They are the accumulated answers to a simple question: what does the assembly process find easy, and what does it find difficult? The eight principles below are the ones that pay back most often,…

PCB Coating Thickness Control: How Much Coating 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 coating thickness control gives you a practical advantage when you…

Fabrication Datums and Fiducials in PCB Design Every process in PCB manufacture locates the work against something. Drilling, imaging, pressing and placement all have to know where the board is before they can act on it, and they all get that answer from datums that the designer placed in the…

Selective Solder Nozzle Choice: Aiming the Wave 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 Selective solder nozzle choice gives you a practical advantage when you…

Filter Circuit Layout in High-Speed PCB Design A filter that performs well on the bench and poorly in the product is usually not a component problem. It is a layout problem: the inductance of the return path, the area enclosed by the current loop and the impedance between the capacitor…