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Secrets of Designing Printed Circuit Boards for Excellence

Designing for excellence requires a disciplined approach of keeping the reliability of the PCB at the forefront of the design process. The performance of the PCB isn’t of much consequence if the board fails prematurely due to low-grade components or unaccounted for peak current...
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assembly-parts

10 Tips to Ensure PCB Assembly Success

As a bare printed circuit board manufacturer, we’ve written extensively on topics related to ensuring that the PCB fabrication process goes smoothly. But what about the PCB assembly process? What steps should be taken to ensure a high-quality, cost-effective outcome?
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Are You Providing Your PCB Manufacturer With the Correct Files?

You’ve completed a PCB design and are ready to send the design to be manufactured. But the file export process isn’t always straightforward, and, depending on the PCB manufacturer, specific requirements may vary. Here are some helpful design file guidelines...
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HASL or ENIG? A Comparison Guide for the Surface Finishes

If you’ve ever had a circuit board professionally manufactured, you have likely been asked your choice between HASL and ENIG surface finishes. From solderability to cost, these two finishes can’t possibly be more different. While some engineers have a tried and true favorite, you may be left...
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High Temperature PCB Design Considerations

Printed Circuit Boards are indispensable electronic devices, but sometimes engineers are faced with temperature constraints that force them to think outside the box. In this article, we will be giving a high-level overview of designing a high temperature circuit board, and along the way we will...
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Tips for Working with PCB Assembly Houses

You’ve prototyped a circuit board and you want to bring it to market. What’s next? Well, aside from choosing a high quality manufacturer to fabricate your PCB, you'll also need to select a vendor to assemble the components to the board. While choosing the an assembly house may seem daunting, we'll share a few tips to make sure your next project goes smoothly.
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Single-sided or Double-sided PCBs?

Fundamentally, single-sided and double-sided printed circuit boards serve the same purpose. Both serve as catalysts for electrical connections between components, however there are some key differences that set them apart from each other. More specifically, they differ in the costs associated with production and development processes, as well as ampacity differences.
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Resources for Learning Electronic Design

Whether you’re a professional design engineer, an electrical engineering student, or an electronics enthusiast/hobbyist/maker, it pays to never stop learning. Fortunately, this is the information age and there’s no shortage of resources available to learn about electronics design. There are many other great electronics design resources available and we thought we’d share a few of our favorites.
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Building a Successful Multi-Layer Printed Circuit Board

Printed Circuit Boards today face an ever-increasing demand in capabilities including high speed, low weight, higher component density, miniaturization, and more. Multi-layer PCBs can help meet those increased demands. A multi-layer PCB is created from two or more PCBs stacked together, although they are not simply laid one on top of the other.
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Tips for Including Fonts & Graphics on a PCB

As PCB aesthetics continue to grow in importance, we’re manufacturing more designs with specific fonts and graphics as a part of the PCB’s silkscreen layer. But if you’re not following the process we’re about to describe, don’t be surprised if things don’t turn out quite the way you expect!
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ITAR Compliance and the Manufacture of Printed Circuit Boards

The U.S. Government requires all manufacturers, exporters, and brokers of defense articles, defense services or related technical data to be ITAR compliant. An increasing number of companies are requiring their supply chain to be ITAR compliant based on the use of the end product even though they may not be engaged in the “export” of the product or its technical information.
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Secrets of a Fabrication Drawing

Essential to the success of any printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturing project are the detailed notes included in the fabrication drawing. While the design files (typically Gerber or ODB++) contain the most basic structure and outline of the board design, it is the fabrication drawing that tells the manufacturer the specific details about a board that make it unique.
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Common Problems with Gerber Files and How to Avoid Them

The PCB manufacturing process is complex. The precision of the manufactured PCBs hinges on many things, but none more important than accurate and complete manufacturing or design data, most often Gerber files. A wide variety of PCB design software applications are used to produce manufacturing data, and the complexity of each design can vary significantly.
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pcb-gold

Circuit Board Design Tips for Hard or Soft Gold

Due to the specialized nature of hard gold and soft gold surface finishes, many designers never encounter the particular challenges associated with these surface finishes. As a result, the first build for a hard or soft gold PCB can often be cumbersome and even surprising.
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Rogers Material: Right For Your Next RF Project?

With the increase in mobile communications from cellular phones, IoT devices and more, the demand for special materials in circuit board manufacturing has increased as well. To help you understand your options, we put together a Q&A with Rogers Corporation, a leading manufacturer of engineered materials.
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Don’t Be Surprised By Markings on a PCB

In the days of the old Model T Ford, you could get any color you wanted – as long as it was black.  Not that long ago it was the same way for printed circuit boards, of course, the only …
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V-Scoring for Printed Circuit Boards

Bay Area Circuits recently installed a new Accu-Score AS-100-MAX V-scoring machine in our Silicon Valley facility. This new scoring machine will not only improve the quality of the printed circuit boards scoring process, but also shortens manufacturing process time.  Both big wins for our customers.  …
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Design Considerations with Heavy Copper

Minimum line width is one of the first questions asked of a PCB manufacturer’s capabilities, but the answer rarely includes “depending on copper weight.” To simplify your design process and avoid problems at the time of manufacturing, we will demonstrate …
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Printed Circuit Board Laminate Material Trends

Recently, we at Bay Area Circuits, have seen an increase in demand for Ventec’s laminate materials in part because of the proliferation of LED lighting and IoT (Internet of Things) products which often have greater than normal requirements for thermal …
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