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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PCB Fabrication
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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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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Optimize PCB Manufacturing: Technical Tips for Success
Designing a printed circuit board poses many challenges. It can be exhilarating to complete a design and send it off to manufacturing but later deflating to receive boards and identify a failure that could have been prevented. Was a mistake …
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Introduction to IPC Inspection Guidelines
Acceptable Quality Level Before discussing IPC Inspection Guidelines, it’s important to understand the meaning of the term Acceptable Quality Level (AQL), also referred to as Acceptance Quality Limit. It is an inspection standard that prescribes the range of the number …
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Bare Printed Circuit Board Electrical Test
Visual inspections are performed following the manufacturing process of a printed circuit board to identify any potential problems. While that may work fine for a two-layer PCB, for multi-layer PCBs, it is almost impossible to visually inspect the internal layers …
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Introduction to Drilling and Vias
It wasn’t that long ago a printed circuit board was drilled using a simple drill press. The operator had to manually move the panel to the correct x and y coordinate and then pull the lever to drill an individual …
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Reshoring of Printed Circuit Board Manufacturing
For many people, the words “Made in the USA” have become a rallying cry. In fact, a survey done in 2012 found that 83% of US citizens disapprove of companies that manufacture their goods overseas and they are interested in …
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An Introduction to PCB Arrays
What is a PCB Array? What do you think of when you hear the word “array”? Perhaps you think of an antenna array, or possibly some type of mathematical array or maybe even Video Graphics Array (VGA like the adapter …
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Printed Circuit Boards Require Counterbores and Countersinks
In this post, we’ll introduce the concept of Countersinks and Counterbores and how these are used in Printed Circuit Boards (of course, countersinks and counterbores are not anything unique to printed circuit boards and are used in a variety of …
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An Inside Look at Manufacturing Circuit Classics PCBs
There's no doubt that we, at Bay Area Circuits, get to work with some very talented individuals working on some pretty incredible projects. Star Simpson is one of those individuals and Circuit Classics is one of those projects! Star is bringing to life classic circuit drawings from Forrest Mims' "Getting Started in Electronics" and recently made the designs available via Crowd Supply.
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Hardware Manufacturing’s Comeback in Silicon Valley – BAC
Are we experiencing a rebirth of Silicon Valley hardware manufacturing? High volume manufacturing of hardware is not something commonly done in Silicon Valley, with much of that work finding its way to places around the globe. But a large amount of new product development, prototyping and low volume production seems to be firmly positioned in the Valley.
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Overview of InstantDFM: Minimizing Failures in PCB Prototype
Has this ever happened to you? You have spent hours designing a new circuit board. You have checked and double checked every net, component and trace on the board and you’re confident your design is solid. Off to a PCB …
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