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Design engineers expect to partner with their manufacturers to ask questions and work through changes, a challenging process when dealing with offshore vendors. In addition to the lack of personal service, shipping costs and time delays can impact an electronic project’s development schedule. Let’s take a closer look at these hindrances and how a US-based PCB manufacturer can resolve them.

You can lower the cost of a PCB if you design it as a double-sided board, but you may strangle its performance by doing so. Using multiple board layers can increase electrical performance to outweigh the differences in cost. Here are some of the advantages of multilayer PCBs and how you can best benefit from them.

When manufacturing printed circuit boards a defect can occur when the metal from two different nets inadvertently gets shorted or bridged together with solder. This particular defect can be small and difficult to find, but the short circuit it creates causes big problems. These can include intermittent connections, false test results, or traces and component leads that burn through. We’re going to take a closer look at this problem and discuss some PCB design methods on how to prevent solder bridging.

One of the primary goals of manufacturing is to build a quality product, but there is more to quality than what you see on the production floor. Quality also means planning to avoid those problems and defects that can derail the delivery of a dependable final product.

When a printed circuit board is built, it’s also beneficial to have added assurance, except in that case we’re looking for problems in manufacturing. Not that we expect to find any defects, but we want to ensure that if a problem does come up we can find and correct it efficiently. This PCB defect detection process takes place with both the bare boards after they are fabricated and the fully assembled circuit boards, both of which we will examine in greater detail below.

Getting a PCB prototyped with speed and precision is an intricate process to manage because the design must also be prepared for eventual long-term production. Balancing the electrical performance and the manufacturability needs of the board requires a lot from both the PCB designer and the manufacturer during the prototype phase. Here are some of the requirements that you should be familiar with so your board can progress successfully through the rapid PCB prototyping phase of its development.