Printed Circuit Design & Fab Online Magazine - Current Issue

Current Issue

Much like a bespoke suit, PCBs require individual tailoring to meet a customer’s needs.

A printed circuit board is not a commodity and many in the electronics supply chain do not understand that. Buyers wanting “champagne at beer prices” leads them to press fabricators to devalue their efforts and work. Additionally, I have spoken with designers who have no idea how boards are made, but then turn around and speak with an air of authority that the fabricator should just “dial in the fabrication process” to etch a narrower trace on their board.

I am not sure what most buyers and designers have in mind of how printed circuit boards are manufactured, but a good analogy helps many to understand that boards are custom tailored, like a fine bespoke suit, and not a garment off the rack.

Read more: Custom Tailored or Off the Rack?

PCEA chapter meetings can be a great source of education and collaboration.

I am excited that my local PCEA chapter has gotten some traction and we are having regular meetings! After a couple years of false starts and hiccups, the Oregon/Pacific Northwest chapter got the spark and the ball rolling with members coming to connect and learn from each other. Which is exciting! I was able to reconnect with someone with whom I worked almost 20 years ago. He was attending from another country, but still views Portland as his "home area."

As our meeting progressed, we had a good educational segment and then an active discussion about topics to discuss next time. A question came up about a mechanical exchange format, and we just happened to have someone in the meeting who works for the company that manages that format! And if we didn't, I am sure we could have reached out to our separate networks of contacts to find an expert to talk with us about it. Meanwhile, additional topics of interest were shared, along with requests for recommendations on specific types of quality fabricators and assemblers. So add that to our list of people to invite and reach out to.

Read more: Pivoting to PCB Design

A tech conference presentation spurs study of an exciting material option.

I like to ask designers about interesting projects or technologies they have worked on, and I heard from two designers, whom I met through my local PCEA chapter, about some very interesting and complex boards they designed using sintered copper. Both had used sintered Ormet Transient Liquid Phase Sintering Paste (TLPS) to design boards that would not have been possible otherwise. (There are a couple different vendors for sintered copper for vias, but I looked further into Ormet materials, as that was the material used in both the boards they told me about.) These boards were complex, with a lot of parts, limited space, RF signals with antennas and sensitive digital components, and I was told these boards would have been impossible to design without the sintered copper to create any-layer vias connections.

The Ormet paste provided a path forward to route, but this wasn't the first time I encountered this material. I first heard about it in 2014 from a fabricator that wanted to be able to document these types of vias in their stackup. In the past two years, however, I heard more and more requests for it from both designers and fabricators. What is it, and why has it taken so long to get traction in the PCB industry? This prompted me to put on my investigation cap and pursue some answers.

Read more: Sintered Copper Can Handle the Pressure