PCB Changeover Time: A Practical Manufacturing Guide 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 changeover time from the perspective of a PCBA factory floor, covering measuring…

PCB Kanban for Parts: A Practical Manufacturing Guide 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…

PCB Feeder Setup Verification: A Practical Manufacturing Guide 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…

Current Loop Transmitter Circuit Design A current loop carries a measurement as a current rather than a voltage, which is why it survives long cables, contact resistance and electrical noise that would ruin a voltage signal. The transmitter at the sensor end converts the measurement into a current between four…

Double Sided and Sandwich Metal Core Board Construction A metal core board conducts heat from a component through a thin dielectric into an aluminium base, and the base spreads it sideways into a heatsink or a chassis. The limitation of the simplest construction is that the circuit is on one…

Where SMD Y Capacitors Are Used and Why A Y capacitor is a safety component. It connects a live circuit to earth, or across an isolation barrier, and it is designed so that if it fails it fails open rather than shorting. Because it sits across the barrier that protects…

Current Sense Shunt Layout: Kelvin Connections and Noise A current sense resistor converts current into a voltage that an amplifier can measure. The conversion depends on the resistance between the two points the amplifier actually connects to, and that is almost never the resistance of the resistor alone. Kelvin, or…

PCB Design Software: Choosing the Right Toolchain Choosing a pcb design software package is a decision that outlives the project it is made for. The tool holds the library, the constraints and the fabrication output, and changing it later means migrating all three. What matters is not the length of…

Solder Paste Dispensing for Prototype and Small Batch SMT Stencil printing is fast and repeatable, but it needs a stencil, and a stencil takes time and money to produce. For a prototype build, a small batch or a board with an unusual mix of parts, solder paste dispensing can be…

Rework Station Practice and Heat Control on PCB Assemblies A rework station is only a bench tool, but what happens at that bench decides whether a repaired assembly is as reliable as one that came off the line. Heat control is the whole discipline: the board has to reach soldering…