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While most PCB drilling is for vias and through-hole components, some drilling does not encompass electrical connectivity. The board’s placement within the enclosure requires mechanical drilling for fasteners, and some large components, like connectors, may utilize support pins for additional vibration dampening. While simple features overall, PCB mounting hole sizes require a basic understanding of…

The increasing prevalence of electronics in automobiles is welcome to consumers for many reasons: improved features increase safety measures or add new functionality that would otherwise be unachievable. There is a drawback with increasing electronic automation of the vehicle, as issues with signal transmission can undermine or override these safety features. For signal integrity, circuits…

As the power demands of devices increase to keep pace with performance, the thermal capabilities of standard PCB materials cannot provide the requisite characteristics for reliable operations. Traditional active and passive cooling approaches can impede project goals and lead to sub-optimal solutions, especially constrained designs due to enclosure size, package weight, or power efficiency. Increasingly,…

Keep a cool head when tackling high-power circuit designs with a metal core PCB stackup.

Have you ever been deep in thought writing and transcribed the words you hear instead of what you intended to write? It was only late in my life that I realized how overloaded my brain becomes when trying to work silently and process spoken words simultaneously. Even if you haven’t experienced the exact phenomenon, the…

Defining the stackup early in the design helps constrain the layout and prevent downstream manufacturing issues. Primarily, a trace width based on the finest pitch component will act as an input to the impedance field solver software; this step ensures manufacturability and coordination with the characteristic impedance necessary for different transmission protocols. While most traces…