Conductive Foam That Survives Reflow: What To Specify Shielding a board used to mean a metal finger strip or a die cut gasket fitted by hand, with a conductive adhesive to bond it. As products have become smaller and production has become automated, that approach has run into two limits…

PCB Hot Air Leveling Control: Coating by Air 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 hot air leveling control gives you a practical advantage…

PCB Nozzle Selection for A Part: Picking the Tip 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 nozzle selection for a part from the perspective of a…

PCB Paste Release From A Stencil: Letting Go 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 paste release from a stencil from the perspective of a PCBA…

Reducing SI/PI Design Iterations On A Wearable Board A wearable device compresses a radio, a processor and a memory interface into a volume smaller than a matchbox, and the memory bus is usually the part that causes the trouble. The interface runs fast, the supply is shared with everything else,…

Hot Bar Soldering: Thermode Process Control for FPC Hot bar soldering joins a flex circuit to a rigid board with a heated metal bar pressed onto a row of pads. The process is fast, it can be reworked, and it produces joints that withstand flexing better than a hand soldered…

Edge Plating and Castellated Holes for Module Edges A small module that must be soldered to a mother board along its edge uses half holes rather than pins. The castellations are drilled and plated as part of the board, then cut in half when the module is separated from its…

Pin in Paste Reflow for Through-Hole Parts A through-hole connector can be soldered in the same reflow pass as the surface mount parts if the paste is printed into the hole as well as onto the pad. The technique removes a process step and it depends entirely on getting enough…

PCB Copper Balance on A Panel: Spreading the Metal 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 copper balance on a panel gives you a…

PCB Stencil Aperture Ratio: How Much Paste Fits 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 stencil aperture ratio from the perspective of a PCBA factory floor,…