Learn about PCB and PCBA together!

About PCB (Printed Circuit Board), the designers must be very familiar with their design. From creativity to a real thing, this is really a wonderful process. To make your GERBER(or other design files)  a material object, “what has it been through?” “what machines does it need?” A work is a designer's child, and you must be very curious about what your child goes through as it grows up. So I will share what I learned with you here, and we can learn together! I hope that you can also actively raise questions and solve them together!

Is it Important to Understand the PCB Fabrication Process?

The question can and probably should be asked: "ls it important to understand the PCB fabrication process?" After all, PCB fabrication is not a design activity, it is an outsourced activity that is performed by a contract manufacturer (CM). Although it is true that fabrication is not a design task, it is done in strict adherence to the specifications that you provide to your CM.

In most cases, your CM is not privy to your design intent or performance objectives. Therefore, they would not be aware of whether you are making good choices for materials layout, via locations and types, trace parameters, or other board factors that set during fabrication and may impact your PCB's manufacturability. production yield rate or performance after deployment, as listed below:

Manufacturability: The manufacturability of your boards depends on a number of design choices. These include ensuring that adequate clearances exist between surface elements and the board edge and that the material selected has a sufficiently high coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) to withstand PCBA, especially for no-lead soldering. Either of these could result in the inability of your board to be built without redesign. Furthermore, if you decide to penalize your designs then that too will require forethought.

Yield rate: Your board can be successfully fabricated, while fabrication issues exist. For example, specifying parameters that stretch the tolerance boundaries of your CM's equipment can result in higher than acceptable numbers of boards that are unusable.

Reliability: Depending upon your board's intended usage it is classifed according to IPC6011. For rigid PCBs, there are three classification levels that set specific parameters that your board's construction must meet to achieve a specified level of performance.