PCB Soft Gold Versus Hard Gold: Two Golds for Two Jobs Two boards can leave the same shop with the same gold color and behave nothing alike. The difference sits in purity, hardness and how the deposit is built. Soft gold is nearly pure and bonds well, while hard gold…

PCB Hardware Design Flow: From Requirements to Release Most hardware projects that run late were not derailed by a difficult circuit. They were derailed by a step that was skipped, compressed or done out of order, and the cost of that omission appeared only at the prototype stage. A defined…

High Speed PCB Layout: Floorplanning and Routing Order High speed design is often discussed as a list of routing rules, but most of the difficulty appears earlier, when the floorplan and the routing order are decided. Two boards with the same stackup and the same components can differ by a…

Thermal Management in PCB Design: Keeping Parts Cool Every watt dissipated on a board has to leave it, and the path it takes is decided by the layout rather than by the schematic. A regulator that runs cool in free air can exceed its limit inside a sealed enclosure simply…

Overmolding PCB Design: Encapsulation and Material Choice Overmolding turns a circuit board into a sealed component. Instead of a housing with a board inside it, the board is placed in a mold and plastic or a soft encapsulant is formed around it, so the finished part is a single sealed…

Carbon Ink PCB: Conductive Printing for Contacts and Jumpers Carbon ink is one of the quiet workhorses of a board. It appears as a black rectangle on the contacts of a keypad, as a short link across two nets that must be joined without a resistor, and as the resistive…

PCB Matte Versus Glossy Solder Mask: Practical Process Controls 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 matte versus glossy solder mask gives you a…

PCB Hard Gold on A Connector: Practical Process Controls 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 hard gold on a connector gives you a…

Component Sourcing and Counterfeit Avoidance The parts on a board decide whether the product works, and the parts that arrive at the assembly house decide whether the design can be built twice the same way. Component sourcing is therefore a design and engineering activity, not an administrative one, and the…

18-Layer Rigid Flex PCB Cost: Prototype to Volume An eighteen layer rigid flex board sits at the top of the interconnect difficulty scale. It combines the lamination complexity of a very high layer count rigid board with the material handling requirements of flexible circuits, and it is usually built because…