What We Need to Know about PCB Design and Fabrication

We live in a world where we now highly depend on the use of technology. Our basic appliances like televisions, radios, refrigerators, microwaves, music and video players and our gadgets like our cell phones, iPads, laptops, and computers—these are all functioning because they depend on complex electronics. And us being simply users of technology are more concerned with their usability and functions more than what makes them up on the inside. After all, we are users and not makers of technology.

However, it pays to know something about the inner workings of these technologies. PCB or printed circuit boards, for instance, are “what happen when an engineer takes some wire, copper, and plastic components and incorporates them together to create a working device. Circuit boards are found in all aspects of technology, and even though they are popular, each prototype PCB must be assembled differently,” wrote an anonymous writer of the article What You Need To Know About PCB Fabrication for pcbunlimited.com.

Electrical engineer from Singapore Engr. Marco Rivalz, explained how pcb design works, “ we, the electronics engineers, create the ‘brains’ of the pcb to make it work. Because without the electronics, these are just some scrap metals and plastics that will never work. First off, we define the product size during the electronic engineering process.  PCB assembly can have single or multiple layers during the manufacturing and the more layers there are, the more complex the work becomes. Toy products for instance may have 2 layers while smart phones and smart watch can have as many as 6 to 8 layers.”

According to the article of pcbunlimited, there are two ways to mounting on placing  a component on  the pcb. They are:

Surface Mount Technology	Through-hole
This is when a machine is able to place components fast and efficiently. It is the most widely used method.	This is when an engineer manually puts components on the PCB through wiring leads into holes in each layer. Generally, this method takes longer and is more expensive.

One of the other important facts we need to know about PCBs according to David Marrakchi in his article 5 PCB Design Facts That Your Boss Needs To Know  is that “PCBs represent approximately 31% of the overall product costs.” In the same article Marrakchi mentioned, “They use traces, not wires. Whereas most electronic devices use wires to transmit data and power, PCBs use traces. These traces take up much less space, allowing the boards to be smaller and thinner. The trade off, though, is that traces are made of copper, which can be expensive. Only small amounts of copper are used, but depending on the weight of the copper, it’s still an expense that needs to be considered as part of the overall PCB budget.”

You may have wondered why PCBs are often colored dark green. In the article 12 Cool Facts About PCB (That You Probably Didn’t Know) for the site pcbtrain.co.uk, a certain writer under the code name pcbtrain, speculated the possible reason/s, “The green that you see is actually the colour of the soldermask showing through the glass. In regards to the origins of the use of the green, there are a few theories. Some speculate that green was the regulation standard when for when PCBs were used by the American military, and the use of it spread from there. It has also been suggested that green could have been the colour of the original solder mask resins, and that we continue to use green as a matter of convention, despite no longer using these materials. In modern circuits a soldermask can actually be made in any colour. However, green has worked well for us so far, and it makes it particularly easy for engineers to see faults in the traces, so many companies tend to stick with it.”