PCB Tray for Shipping Boards: What Matters on the Production Line 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 tray for shipping boards gives you…

MCPCB Price: What a Metal Core Board Really Costs A metal core board solves a problem that ordinary laminate cannot: it moves heat sideways and out of the assembly rather than letting it accumulate under the die. That capability comes from a metal base plate bonded to a thin thermal…

Set-Top Box PCB Design: Blocks and Signal Flow A set-top box board looks busy for its size, and the reason is that it contains three or four different kinds of circuit on one substrate: a radio frequency front end, a high-speed digital core with its memory, and analogue audio and…

BGA Soldering and Rework: Controlling Temperature and the Profile Ball grid array packages fail in a narrow temperature window that is easy to miss and hard to diagnose. The solder balls are underneath the package, so the joint cannot be inspected visually, and the difference between a good joint and…

Thermal Vias and Filled Vias: Choosing for Heat and Current A via can be asked to do two very different jobs. It can conduct heat away from a device, or it can provide a flat surface for a component to be mounted on. The first requirement is met by an…

PCB Assembly and Box Build: Scope, Testing and Handover Printed circuit board assembly ends with a tested board. Box build ends with a product that can be shipped, including the enclosure, the cables, the labels and the packaging. The two are separate services, and the boundary between them is one…

High-Frequency PCB and Microwave PCB: Where the Line Is The two terms are used interchangeably in conversation and they describe overlapping sets of boards. A high-frequency board operates where the interconnect must be treated as a transmission line; a microwave board operates where the wavelength is short enough that distributed…

2-Layer Flex PCB: Cost Structure and Design Choices A two layer flexible circuit looks simple on a drawing, but its price is set by a stack of decisions that rigid boards never face: which base film is used, how the copper is protected, whether stiffeners are bonded, and how many…

Rogers 3006 PCB: High Dk Material for Radar and RF Most high frequency laminates compete on how low their dielectric constant can go, because a low value makes traces wide and loss small. Rogers 3006 goes the other way. Its dielectric constant of 6.15 is roughly double that of the…

Ceramic Substrates: Where They Beat FR-4 and Where They Do Not A ceramic substrate is chosen when the heat or the thermal cycling is beyond what a glass-fibre laminate can survive. The advantage is real, and so is the cost: ceramic is more expensive per unit area, is available in…