A printed circuit board (PCB) uses copper conductors to create electrical connections between electronic components and provide mechanical support for mounting components inside an enclosure. Key features of PCBs include copper traces, pads, and conductive planes laminated between insulating materials. A PCB design must follow manufacturing steps including etching copper layers, plating, adding a solder mask and silkscreen. PCBs play an important role in electronics by electrically connecting components and providing a compact package that can be integrated into end products.
A printed circuit board (PCB) uses copper conductors to create electrical connections between electronic components and provide mechanical support for mounting components inside an enclosure. Key features of PCBs include copper traces, pads, and conductive planes laminated between insulating materials. A PCB design must follow manufacturing steps including etching copper layers, plating, adding a solder mask and silkscreen. PCBs play an important role in electronics by electrically connecting components and providing a compact package that can be integrated into end products.
A printed circuit board (PCB) uses copper conductors to create electrical connections between electronic components and provide mechanical support for mounting components inside an enclosure. Key features of PCBs include copper traces, pads, and conductive planes laminated between insulating materials. A PCB design must follow manufacturing steps including etching copper layers, plating, adding a solder mask and silkscreen. PCBs play an important role in electronics by electrically connecting components and providing a compact package that can be integrated into end products.
A printed circuit board (PCB) uses copper conductors to create electrical connections between electronic components and provide mechanical support for mounting components inside an enclosure. Key features of PCBs include copper traces, pads, and conductive planes laminated between insulating materials. A PCB design must follow manufacturing steps including etching copper layers, plating, adding a solder mask and silkscreen. PCBs play an important role in electronics by electrically connecting components and providing a compact package that can be integrated into end products.
Zachariah Peterson | Created: October 5, 2020 | Updated: August 28, 2021 (shortened)
What is PCB? A ___________(PCB) is an electronic assembly that uses copper
conductors to create electrical connections between components. Printed circuit boards provide mechanical support for electronic components so that a device can be mounted in an enclosure. A printed circuit board design must include a specific set of steps that aligns with the manufacturing process, integrated circuit packaging, and the structure of the bare circuit board.
________ features on printed circuit boards include copper traces, pads, and conductive planes. The mechanical structure is made up of an insulating material laminated between layers of conductors. The overall structure is plated and covered with a non-conductive solder mask, and a ______________is printed on top of the solder mask to provide a legend for electronic components. After these fabrication steps are completed, the bare board is sent into printed circuit board assembly, where components are soldered to the board and the PCBA can be tested.
The printed circuit board design has grown into its own vertical within the electronics industry. PCBs play an important role in that they provide electrical interconnections between components, ____support to hold components, and a compact package that can be integrated into an end product. Even the most basic circuit board has to be carefully designed using specialized software packages, and the best software can help take a design from concept all the way through manufacturing. In this article, we'll look deeper at what is a PCB meaning, its design description, and some of the important points to understand when designing circuit boards.
All printed circuit boards are built from alternating layers of conductive copper with layers of electrically insulating material. During manufacturing, the inner copper layers are etched, leaving the intended traces of ______for connecting components in the circuit board. Multiple etched layers are laminated in succession until the printed circuit board stack-up is complete. This is the overall process used in PCB design fabrication, where the bare board is formed before passing through a printed circuit board's assembly process.
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How to Understand Printed Circuit Boards
Before we can explain PCB board design, it is best to understand where PCBs have come from. In the past, electronics were designed and assembled from small integrated circuits and discrete________, which were connected together using wires. Today, standard designs can have high pin count components with many integrated circuits and very small passive components, making it impossible to manually connect components together with soldered wires. Instead, copper connections are deposited directly on insulating substrates to form electrical connections, and the manufacturing processes for circuit boards have evolved alongside the structural requirements for electronics packages and interconnects. Many of today's devices are advanced HDI designs with thousands of connections and multiple electrical interfaces, powering everything from smartphones to heart rate monitors to _______.
Before printed circuit boards, components were packaged by attaching individual
wires to components, and by mounting components to a rigid substrate. This original substrate was initially a material called bakelite, which was used to replace the top ply on a sheet of plywood. Conductive paths were formed by _______ metal components to wires, and larger circuits could contain many electronic components with many wires. The number of wires was so great that they could get tangled or inhabit a large space within a design. ________ was difficult and reliability suffered. Manufacturing was also slow, where multiple components and their wired connections were manually soldered.
Structure and Applications of PCBs
Many of the important performance characteristics of a PCB are defined in the stack- up or the arrangement of _______ in the PCB. The layer stack-up is built with alternating layers of conductive and insulating material, and with alternating layers of core and prepreg (two types of dielectrics used in the layer stack-up). The dielectric and mechanical properties of the core and prepreg will determine reliability and signal/power integrity in the design, and they should be selected carefully when designing for high-reliability applications. For example, military and medical applications need highly reliable designs that might be deployed in harsh environments, and a PCB for a telecom system might require a low-loss PTFE laminate in a small package.
An example of a PCB stack-up is shown below. In this example, the stack-up
implements a 4-layer structure with two internal plane layers (L02_GND for ground, and L03_PWR for power). This type of stack-up is appropriate for IoT devices, lightweight embedded systems, and many other designs that use high-speed protocols. The internal plane arrangement helps ensure power integrity while also providing some shielding against external EMI. The internal plane layers also provide a consistent reference for controlled impedance signals. This type of stack-up is typical for many designs and is often a starting point for many ______ printed circuit boards.
