PCB Conveyor Speed in Reflow: The Clock of the Oven 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 conveyor speed in reflow gives you a…

PCB Reflow Oven Zone Settings: Design, Process, and Quality Notes 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 reflow oven zone settings gives you a…

PCB Cooling Zone in Reflow: Design and Assembly Considerations 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…

Running a Pre-Release PCB Design Review Most board re-spins are not caused by a clever circuit that did not work. They are caused by a footprint with the wrong pad spacing, a connector placed too close to its neighbour, a silkscreen reference sitting on top of a via, or a…

Medical Electronics PCB: Applications and Requirements Medical electronics is a broad category that ranges from a disposable glucose strip to a surgical robot, and the boards inside them have little in common except the regulatory framework they sit in. What distinguishes a medical PCB is not usually the circuit but…

PCB Solder Paste Volume Per Joint: Process Details and Inspection Points 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 solder paste volume per joint from the perspective…

Power Plane Design: Current Capacity and Splitting Power distribution is the part of a layout that is easiest to defer and most expensive to get wrong. It is not a single net with a single rule; it is a set of copper shapes, via arrays and plane boundaries that have…

PCB Hole Structures: Blind Via, Buried Via and Microvia The holes in a circuit board are not all the same thing, and the differences between them determine how dense a design can be, how much it costs and how reliable it turns out. A through hole that accepts a component…

PCB Dimensions: Thickness, Tolerances and Edge Clearance PCB dimensions are the set of mechanical parameters that decide whether a board can be built, assembled and fitted into its enclosure: length and width, thickness, copper weight, hole size, outline tolerance and the clearance between the outermost copper and the board edge.…

Embedded Copper Coins: How Heat Leaves a Board Coin insertion, also called embedded copper, is the practice of pressing a solid piece of copper into a cavity in the board so that its face is flush with the surface. The coin becomes part of the thermal path, and in some…