PCB Filled Via Peel Off: When the Fill Pulls Away 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 filled via peel off from the perspective of a…

PCB Backdrill for High Speed: Removing the Stub 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…

High Current PCB Design: Width, Copper and Heat Sooner or later a design has to move more current than a comfortable trace width allows. A motor driver, a battery charger, a distribution rail or a heater all push the copper toward the point where one millimetre per ampere stops being…

Lead-Free Solder vs Leaded Solder in PCBA Assembly Soldering is one of the few areas of electronics where two entirely different processes coexist in the same industry, and the choice between them is made long before the oven is switched on. Lead-free solder dominates consumer production because regulation demands it,…

PTFE Dielectric Constant in FR4 Boards: A Design Guide The question of what PTFE dielectric constant applies inside an otherwise ordinary board sounds simple, and the short answer is that it does not change: the material keeps its own value wherever it sits. The longer answer is that putting two…

Rigid-Flex PCB Material Selection: Polyimide and Adhesives A rigid-flex PCB is only as good as the materials chosen for it, because the same assembly has to behave like a rigid board in the populated areas and like a cable in the bending areas. A material that looks adequate on a…

Migrating Design Data Between EDA Platforms Changing an EDA platform is a project rather than an installation. The copper transfers more easily than anything else; what costs the time is the data around the copper, the footprint attributes, the net names, the rules and the libraries that accumulated over years…

Copper Thickness for IoT PCB Designs: How to Choose Copper thickness is one of the few PCB parameters that touches current capacity, thermal behaviour, signal quality and price at the same time, yet it is often fixed by habit rather than by calculation. On an IoT product the decision is…

Ceramic PCB Fabrication: Alumina, AlN and DBC Technology There is a point in a design where the thermal path stops being a layout problem and becomes a material problem. A power module that has to move tens of watts through a surface the size of a postage stamp, a radio…

IoT Device PCB Assembly: A Step by Step Guide An IoT device usually has to do several things at once: sense something, process the data, transmit it, and survive for years on a small battery in an environment nobody controls. Each of those requirements leaves a mark on the IoT…