Valley Services Electronics

Silicon Valley’s Premier Electronic and PCB Assembly Blog

smt vs through hole components

4 Keys to Achieving Quick Turnaround PCB Assembly

Design review takes some time, especially for a high-layer-count, high-net-count PCB. Anytime design problems are spotted, your manufacturer must engage in back-and-forth communication with you, the customer, to fix these design problems. The key to ensuring quick turnaround PCB assembly time is to anticipate these potential problems through early communication.

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pcb footprint creation guidelines

The SMT PCB Assembly Process: What Engineers Should Know

Your contract manufacturer also must be fully prepared when they manufacture your printed circuit boards with surface mount components. Of course, there’s a lot more to this preparation than just picking up a few extra paint brushes. The raw boards must be prepared for assembly, and the automated placement machines must be set up with parts before the board can go through the production line. Let’s take a moment to look more closely at the SMT PCB assembly process and how that might affect some of your PCB design decisions.

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component orientation on pcb

PCB Thermal Relief Guidelines for Manufacturing

If those pins are the leads of a thru-hole device, then soldering or un-soldering those pins can be very difficult with all of the metal in the planes they connect to. This is where the thermal relief comes in, and there are some PCB thermal relief guidelines that you should know more about.

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