Valley Services Electronics

Silicon Valley’s Premier Electronic and PCB Assembly Blog

medical pcb

Six Challenges of Medical Device Product Development

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus, the need for rapid medical device product development has been dramatically highlighted. We all marveled at how quickly heavy equipment manufacturers switched production over to building urgently needed medical supplies such as respirators and personal protective equipment. The droves of people who stepped up with home-made protective face masks—often funding a good cause—have been positively inspiring. But for the development of new medical products, this ingenuity needs to be taken to the next level. Medical device innovators need to partner with electronics manufacturers that are equipped to handle these six challenges in the development of their products.

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PCB layout constraints

What Are the IPC Component Spacing Guidelines?

To avoid designing a circuit board that isn’t manufacturable, minimum standards for component spacing must be adhered to in the design layout. Of course, there are many other factors to consider as well, including the electrical and thermal performance of the board, but designing for manufacturability (DFM) is just as important. There are industry standards that offer some assistance with this, however, and here we’ll look at how IPC component spacing guidelines can help as you design.

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analog PCB layout guidelines

Eight Important PCB Panelization Guidelines to Know

While we may think in terms of an individual printed circuit board when designing them, the reality is that circuit boards are often laid out in a panel to help lower production costs. Let’s take a look at what a PCB panel is, and then the eight PCB panelization guidelines that you should know for circuit board design.

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pcb first article inspection process

Six Best Practices to Ensure PCB Design Completion

In the first three parts of this series we have looked at the schematic capture process, placing components in the physical layout of the board, and finally routing the net connections of the layout. Now it is time to get the board ready to be manufactured, but before we do that there is one critical step that has to be done; running the design rule checks.

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pcb footprint creation guidelines

Five Types of Soldering Defects in PCB Assemblies and How to Avoid Them

In the manufacturing of circuit boards, there are also many opportunities for defects to sneak in and as with everything else, it is important to prevent them from happening. One area that can be prone to defects is when components are soldered onto the board. We’re going to take a look at some of the more common types of soldering defects here in this article and explore some design recommendations that can prevent them from happening in the first place.

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