PCB Assembly Cost Drivers and Quotation Inputs An assembly price is the sum of a material cost, a process cost, a test cost and a yield allowance. The quotation is usually argued at the total, when the decisions that set it were made in the design. What Drives the Material…

Planar Coil PCB Design for Inductive Sensing and Power Some boards exist to carry components, and some exist to be the component. A planar coil replaces a wound inductor with copper windings etched into the layers, and the reason to do that is repeatability as much as size. What a…

Gate Driver: Design Rules and Process Limits A gate driver sits between a controller that runs at a few volts and a power switch that may sit hundreds of volts above or below it. The isolation between the two is the defining feature of the part, and the way it…

Burn-in and Screening Test Justification Screening is the application of a stress to a population so that the weak units fail before they are shipped. Burn-in is the same idea applied with power and temperature, and it is expensive enough that it should be justified. What Screening Can and Cannot…

Gold Embrittlement: Design Rules and Process Limits Gold dissolves into molten solder, and the joint that results is not the alloy the process was qualified with. The effect is well known in older tin lead processes and it is not confined to them. What Gold Embrittlement Is Gold dissolves quickly…

Tin Whisker: Design Rules and Process Limits Tin whiskers are thin filaments that grow out of a tin finish over time. They are conductive, they can bridge a gap that was designed to be several hundred volts, and they grow in the field rather than in the factory. What a…

Eight Layer Board: Impedance Control and Stackup Design An eight layer board is the point at which a design stops being a set of stacked signal layers and starts being a controlled transmission environment. There are enough layers to give every high speed net a reference plane, enough planes to…

Copper Deposition and Hole Wall Quality in PCB Fabrication Copper deposition is what turns a drilled hole in a laminate into an electrical connection. The hole wall is an insulator, and the only way to plate it is to make it conductive first. That first conductive layer is thin, fragile…

First Pass Yield, Defect Pareto and Rework Cost A yield figure on its own tells you that something is wrong and nothing else. The first pass yield, broken down by defect type and by location on the board, is what turns a number into an action. Which Yield to Measure…

Solder Mask Cure Verification and Resistance Testing Solder mask that has not fully cured looks almost identical to solder mask that has. It is the right colour, it covers the right areas and it passes a visual inspection without comment. The difference only appears later, when the board is exposed…