PCB Moisture Sensitive Level: The Number on the Bag A sealed bag carries a printed label, and that label decides how the part is handled. The moisture sensitive level states how much moisture a package can absorb and how long it may stay exposed. Ignore it and the reflow oven…

Star Ground: Preparation, Placement and Process Control The star ground is one of the most repeated pieces of layout advice and one of the most frequently misapplied. It solves a real problem, but only in circuits where that problem exists, and it creates new ones when a solid plane is…

Microvia Reliability in HDI Board Design and Assembly Microvias are the small laser-drilled holes that let HDI boards pack more routing into less space, and they are also the feature most likely to fail a thermal cycling test. Because the hole is only a fraction of a millimetre deep and…

Flexible Circuit Design Steps: How a Flex Board Is Built A flexible circuit is designed around movement rather than around area, and that changes the order in which decisions have to be made. The bend comes first, the stackup follows, and the conductor geometry is derived from both. This guide…

High Frequency HDI Stackup Design Rules As soon as a design needs more connections per square centimetre than through vias will allow, the stackup becomes a high density interconnect problem. The transition is not gradual: at a certain density the escape routing from a large array package simply cannot be…

Fanout Via Design: Escaping Dense Packages on a PCB Fanout is the bridge between the package and the board. Before any signal can travel across the board it has to escape the pin field of the device that drives it, and for a large ball grid array that escape is…

AI in PCB Design: What Can Be Automated and What Cannot Until recently the role of artificial intelligence in electronics was advisory. It answered questions about how to route a differential pair, what to check in a power layout, or why a signal was noisy, and the engineer applied the…

PCB Land Pattern Selection: A Practical Review for Manufacturing Teams 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 land pattern selection gives you a practical…

PCB Pad Design for Chip Parts: A Practical Review for Manufacturing Teams 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…

PCB Cold Joint Causes: What Matters on the Production Line 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…