Electrical Testing Options for Bare Printed Circuit Boards

There are 2 types of PCB bare board testing options available at most PCB manufacturing shops: Flying-Probe Testing & Fixture Testing. There are advantages in each type depending on board quantity, lead-time, and accuracy.

Flying Probe testing is usually used for low quantity printed circuit boards and always uses the Netlist extracted from the supplied Gerbers. Fixture Testing on the other hand has 2 options. 1st is the Golden-board testing which extracts the Netlist from an existing PCB. 2nd is Netlist based testing which uses the Netlist from the Gerbers.

If youd like a specific type of electrical testing done on your PCBs, please contact your PCB supplier for more information and pricing options.

Industrial and Medical Electronics Trends

Innovation and cost savings are now the key growth drivers for industrial companies worldwide.  Introducing more and more electronics and intelligence into their products is mandatory to survive.
As a result, the global industrial and medical electronics production will start a new growth cycle, which is forecast to reach 6.5% in average over the period 2012-2017.

Demand today is outweighed by major energy concerns. This modifies the expected technological road-map and the renewal demand routines. A growing part of the market will turn towards smart energy saving systems.

Industrial and medical electronics can be divided into the following 5 segments.

1. Transportation: electronics equipment for railways, marine and off-road vehicles applications, (excluding automotive electronics, aerospace, and defense systems).

2. Power electronics: includes UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply), labs and industrial power supplies, solar inverters, and power distribution networks as a first segment, solar panels and electronic lighting as two other ones.

3. Automation: control equipment for factory and utility automation on one hand, and building and home automation for the second one.

4. Medical electronics: imaging systems, implants, other diagnosis and therapy equipment.

5. Instrumentation, measuring and test equipment: Automatic Test Equipment (ATE), general instrumentation, telecommunications instrumentation, metering.

Industrial electronic equipment production breakdown by segments in 2017:

Read the full article at http://www.ttiinc.com/object/me-coulon-20140626.html

Source: DECISION (Extract from the World Electronic Industries 2012 – 2017 Forecast report)

Slow Growth for the North American PCB Industry

IPC - Association Connecting Electronics Industries announced the April findings from its monthly North American Printed Circuit Board (PCB) Statistical Program.

Sales and Orders Slow but Improving

Total North American PCB shipments increased 1.6 percent in April 2014 from April 2013, which moved year-to-date shipment growth to -0.2 percent. Compared to the previous month, PCB shipments declined 12.0 percent.

PCB bookings strengthened but continued negative at -1.5 percent year over year. Year-to-date order growth, while still negative, improved to -5.6 percent. Order growth fell 8.1 percent from the previous month.

The North American PCB book-to-bill ratio held steady in April at 1.01.

Read the article at http://www.ipc.org/ContentPage.aspx?Pageid=IPC-Releases-PCB-Industry-Results-for-April-2014

From PCB Design to PCB Fabrication

Too often the information en-route from PCB Design to PCB Fabrication is not conveyed properly, resulting in poor boards, higher costs, design re-spins, and ultimately slower product time-to-market. However, these problems can be avoided through careful planning, thorough communication, and proper documentation from the design-end.

A simple view of a typical product cycle from PCB Design to PCB Fabrication is shown below.

At Electronic Interconnect, at the Prototype Fabrication stage, we have seen a plethora of issues which could have been avoided if the Design Engineer had only provided the correct documentation and data for manufacturing the PCB. Some of the main issues are highlighted in the red box above. Overall, going back to the Design Engineer for documents, such as a dimensional drawing of the PCB, result in loss of time and money for all parties involved. Major issues which cause slowdown at the Prototype stage occur after a design-for-manufacturing check finds errors which will impede moving forward due to technology constraints; this is to say when no such constraints were intentionally added by the Design Engineer. For example, small annular rings around Vias, exceptionally thin trace widths and spacings, or antennas and electrical shorts, missing layers, missing drawings and notes; these issues will halt all operations in the engineering department before going to the plant floor. This will, in-turn, mean that the Design Engineer will have to go through each of these issues and either provide waivers to continue as-is, or a new set of fixed data.

In conclusion, valuable time can be saved with a concentrated effort at the design stage to provide proper documentation and cleaner data for efficient PCB fabrication!

For any questions, including DRC/DFM reviews, visit www.eiconnect.com

Electronic Interconnect - Engineering Student Program

At Electronic Interconnect we value our engineering students, because they are the future for engineering advances.

Our Engineering Student Program Features:

1. Projects sponsorship
2. PCB Standard Spec for ONLY $25.00 Each
3. PCB standard Spec for ONLY $2.50 Per Square Inch
4. PCB Layout Software
5. PCB File Check [Free DRC]
6. Multilayer Zoom PCB orders

Find additional information at http://www.eiconnect.com/students_program.aspx

Contact Electronic Interconnect for sponsorship details!

LED Design On Metal-Core Printed Circuit Boards

We have all seen a recent boom in the lighting industry; LEDs are indeed illuminating the future. As you consider converting existing engineering designs, metal-core PCBs have the answer to manage the LEDs intense heat-output problems.

Contact us at design@eiconnect.com if you are interested in up-converting your single-sided FR-4 designs to Metal-Core based boards, or if you would like to start from scratch using this material.

Visit our website at www.eiconnect.com for PCB Fabrication and Ordering information.

Electroninc Interconnect Offers Customer Referal Reward Program

For Every New PCB Customer you Refer to Electronic Interconnect we will send you a $25 visa gift card.
Most of our new customers come to us via referral from our many satisfied customers.

We take that as a very high compliment, and we have made it a practice to show our appreciation by sending $25 visa gift card to those making the referrals.

Refer a new customer to us and after they have placed their first zoom order of amount more then $250.00, we will send you a $25 visa gift card.

See more PCB promotions and coupons.