Designing with PCB assembly in mind is one of the most important and frequently misunderstood elements. This series is dedicated to helping you become a designing pro—someone whose PCB design has been optimized on the first try, ensuring a smooth quickturn PCB...
Perfect PCB soldering is easy! It’s also very rare. What can explain this contradiction? If perfect soldering is easy, why is there so much touchup and rework? The answer, of course, is that it’s easy if you know how. And most of what the soldering “experts” have told...
Did you know that more than 25% of PCB failures occur due to ionic contamination? These contaminated PCBs are sent back to the manufacturer for revision. Additionally, ionic contamination may cause a catastrophic failure, leading to a substantial financial loss for a...
When the temperature of a PCB assembly starts rising, the owner of that board begins to sweat profusely. Clearly, they feel the heat more than the components on the board do. Jokes apart, don’t lose your cool, metal cores are here for you. The rapid development of the...
A few days back, I came across a really cool quote about data. “In God we trust. All others must bring data.” – W. Edwards Deming, statistician. Since then, I have been wondering what could be the best way to share, incorporate and explain this. What’s better than our...
My previous posts have discussed specific soldering-related topics to help you achieve perfect soldering. Following are some soldering tips that, while very important, do not require hundreds of words each. The 8 Must-Knows in Soldering 1. There’s no point in...
Surface mount technology is not a zero-defect soldering process. In this article, we will look into simple defects in surface mount technology (SMT) that cause your PCB to fail and try to work out how to avoid them. Do you remember when you first heard of saturation?...
In PCB soldering temperature and time must be tightly controlled, if you aim for a better outcome. It’s a balancing act, indeed. PCB assemblies require processing at a high temperature for a long enough time period for good solder joints. But again overshooting the...
As the electronic devices are shrinking in size, the pitch size is drastically decreasing. The components are getting packed on a PCB like the grains in an ear of corn. All these things have led to one of the most efficient component package, the Ball Grid Array...