Small Batch SMT Assembly: What Separates a Good Factory At small volumes the choice of assembly partner matters more than the price. A few dozen boards look like a low-risk order, and the temptation is to take the cheapest quotation. What usually follows is a batch with poor joints, shifted…

Surface Finish Selection: HASL, ENIG or OSP The surface finish is decided at the design stage and then forgotten until something goes wrong at assembly. It is the layer of metal on the pads that protects the copper and allows solder to wet it, and the choice between the common…

SMT Assembly for Wearable ECG Recorders on Rigid-Flex Boards A wearable ECG recorder has to fit signal acquisition, storage, communication and power management into a space the size of a wristband. The board that results carries small passives, QFN devices, board-to-board connectors and a flexible tail that reaches the electrodes,…

Layout Shortcuts and Automation That Speed Up PCB Design Layout is a long series of small, repeated operations, and the time a design takes is largely the time those operations consume. Two engineers with the same circuit and the same deadline will finish days apart, and the difference is almost…

PCB Design Outsourcing: When an In-House CAD Team Is Not the Answer The most common arrangement in a small or medium hardware company is that the hardware engineers do the layout themselves. The reason is understandable: they know the circuit, they are available, and the layout tool is on the…

Why PCB Design Quality Decides Whether a Project Succeeds A low price is not a competitive advantage in a market where the product has to work. In electronics it is not even a saving, because the board is a small part of the total cost of a project and a…

Ten Golden Rules of PCB Design That Still Apply Semiconductor integration keeps improving and complete systems on a chip are available off the shelf, yet most products still need a board of their own. That board is the physical platform on which the rest of the design is built, and…

Pin Count for a PCB Design Quote: Where the Numbers Come From Layout services are usually priced by the pin, because the pin count is the closest thing to a measure of the work. It correlates with the number of connections to be routed, the number of pads to be…

Board Level ESD Protection: Chassis Ground, Guard Rings and Placement Static charge arrives from a person, from the environment or from another part of the same equipment, and it arrives in a few nanoseconds carrying several amperes. What it does to a semiconductor is varied and mostly permanent: it punctures…

DDR4 SDRAM Design Points and Their Layout Consequences Fourth generation memory changed the layout problem rather than only the data rate. The supply fell to 1.2 V, the bus moved to a point-to-point arrangement with on-die termination, and a set of training routines moved into the controller to absorb the…