PCB Backdrill for High Speed: Process Details and Inspection Points 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…

PCB Filled Via Peel Off: When the Fill Pulls Away A filled via should end as a flat, solid plug that carries paste and solder without moving. When the fill pulls away, the pad becomes a shallow dish with a loose disc inside it. The paste sinks, the joint starves,…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

Automated Optical Inspection in PCB Manufacturing Inspection is the part of assembly that does not add value to the product, yet it decides whether the value produced upstream reaches the customer. Automated optical inspection has become the default way to check an assembled board because it is fast, consistent and…