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Many industries have a standard engineering process or workflow that they implement to keep everyone on the same page and to ensure teams are productive. Processes and workflows might seem like they eliminate creativity or stifle ingenuity, but they are implemented for many good reasons. In the electronics industry, we implement a specific PCB design flow to guide new products from concept and, eventually, into full-scale production. Electronics...

Anytime you design a new product that will be manufactured at scale, your job suddenly shifts from knowing everything about the design to knowing everything about the manufacturing process. You'll have one last set of tasks to complete before your job as a designer is complete: prepare the manufacturing documentation your manufacturer needs to begin production on your rigid-flex circuit board. For rigid-flex, the fabrication concerns and...

In order to produce reliable rigid-flex based products, there are many considerations relating the fabrication and the end-use of the flex circuit, to the design of the copper pattern. Before you start placing and routing circuits in your flex/rigid-flex PCB, make sure you follow these flexible printed circuit engineering tips to ensure high yield and durability. These tips will help you balance durability in flex designs with the need to place...

If you thought the rigid PCB fabrication process was complex, then flex PCB manufacturing might seem to be on another level of complexity. However, many of the same steps used in standard rigid board fabrication conceptually transfer flex PCB fabrication. This guide provides an overview of all the steps implemented in the flex PCB manufacturing process. These processes are very similar to rigid PCB fabrication processes but involve different...

Flex PCB materials need to support multiple design and operational goals: static or dynamic flexing, the ability to pass through standard assembly processes, and support for simple fabrication procedures with high yield. Flex PCB materials may seem exotic at first, but a relatively small material set is used to produce flex and rigid-flex PCBs at high volume. In this guide, we'll examine some of the basic properties of flex PCB materials and how...

In the business of PCB design, communicating needs to manufacturers and vendors is a top priority. The context of our requests is sometimes lost either by not providing the correct information, not listing enough information, or not giving any information. Although the experienced PCB designer can take steps to specify everything they want to see in their PCB stackup, eventaully the manufacturer will handle that decision in an effort to balance...

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When most students get started in electrical and electronics engineering courses, they probably don’t consider the potential career paths related to printed circuit board (PCB) design. However, today’s modern electronics wouldn’t work without high-quality PCB designs that hold components and provide electrical connections required for leading-edge technology. PCBs are much more than a tool for making electrical connections, they are carefully...

If semiconductors are like the organs in the human body, then a printed circuit board (PCB) is like the skeleton and vessels that give an electronic device its structure. Modern electronics as we understand them today would not be possible without PCBs, and the use of PCBs as packaging for electronic components is not going away any time soon. The PCBs in electronic devices, ranging from smartphones to the home appliances, have to be precisely...