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Printed circuit boards are also coated or plated for their protection, and often this is done with a surface finish of solder or some other material. Not only does this help to protect the exposed metal on the board from corrosion, but it helps with component soldering. These aren’t the only plating processes used to fabricate a circuit board. Here is a more in-depth look at the different PCB plating processes used during circuit board manufacturing.

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.