Archive for the ‘Design Guide’ Category

“Eight” Safety Spacings You Must Know In PCB Design

Wednesday, December 7th, 2022

There are many places in the Printed Circuit Board Design that need to consider the safety spacing, here we summarized Eight Safety Spacings in total to show you what spacing we should pay attention to when designing, they can be separated into two categories, one is Electrical-Related Safety Spacing, and another is Non-Electrical-Related Safety Spacing.

Electrical-Related Safety Spacings

  • Wire Spacing

As far as the processing capability of the mainstream PCB manufacturer is concerned, the spacing between the wires shall not be less than 0.075mm. The minimum line distance refers to line to line, line to pad space.  From a production perspective, the larger the better, and the more common wire spacing is 0.25mm by far.

  • Diameter and Width of Pad

From the processing capability of mainstream PCB manufacturers, the minimum diameter shall not less than 0.15mm if the holes on pad requires mechanically drilled. If used laser drilling, then hole diameter must greater or equal than 0.10mm. At the same time, the tolerance of hole diameters varies slightly according to different substrates. Generally, it can be controlled within 0.05mm, and the minimum width of the pad should not be less than 0.2mm.

  • Spacing between Pad to Pad

The spacing between pads must be at least 0.2mm as far as the processing capacity of mainstream PCB manufacturers concerned.

  • Copper and Edge of the Board Spacing

The spacing between electronic copper and edge of the board should be no less than 0.30mm, and it can be set spacing rule on the “Design – Rules – Board outline” page.

If it requires a larger area of copper, it is generally needs to set 0.5mm as a retraction spacing from the edge of board. In the PCB design and manufacturing industries, engineers often shrink the large area of copper coating to the edge of the board by 20mil for mechanical considerations of the finished circuit board, or to avoid the occurrence of curling or electrical short circuit caused by the exposure of copper on the edge of the board, rather than coating whole copper to the edge of the board.

There are many methods to handle such shrink problems, such as drawing a keepout layer and then set a distance between copper and the keepout. As a professional PCB manufacturer that have rich experience over 16years, there is a much easy way to set different safety spacings for copper objects. For example, the safety spacing of the whole board set as 0.25mm, then we can set copper to 0.5mm, which can achieve a shrink distance of 0.5mm, and the dead copper that may cause in some devices also can be removed as well.

Non-Electrical-Related Safety Spacing

  • Width, Height and Spacing of Legends

We can’t make any changes during the processing of text legend film, except that the line width of legend with D-CODE less than 0.22mm (8.66mil) is enlarged to 0.22mm, that is, the line width of legends L=0.22mm (8.66mil). 

The width of the whole charact legends W=1.0mm, the height of the whole legends H=1.2mm, the spacing between the legends D=0.2mm. When the text is less than the above standard, the text legends after printing will be blurred.

  • Spacing between Via to Via

The spacing between vias to vias is preferably not less than 8mil.

  • Spacing between Legend to Pad

Legends/Silkscreens are not allowed on the pads, otherwise, the covered area can’t be tinned and which will affect the assembly process finally. Generally, manufacturer requires a 8mil space to convenient for silkscreen printing, but if your PCB is small and limited in area, it is barely acceptable to leave a 4 mil safety space.

If some legends accidentally over the pads in your design, Best Technology will remove or move to another area when get your approval to ensure good tinned.

Of course, design on a case-by-case situation.  Sometimes the screen printing is deliberately close to the pad, because when the two pads are very close, the screen printing in middle can effectively prevent the short circuit of the solder connection during soldering, and this is another case.

  • Mechanical 3D height and Horizontal Spacing

When mounting the components on the PCB surface, it is necessary to consider whether there will be conflicts with other mechanical structures in horizontal direction and spatial height.  Therefore, in the PCB design, the compatibility between components, finished products and product outer house and spatial structure should be fully considered, and the safety spacing should be reserved for each target object to ensure there is no conflicts occur in space.

In summary, there are many data and key points should be pay highly attention to while in PCB designing, Best Technology manufactures varies of good quality PCBs for our customers, so please do not hesitate to contact us when you have PCB design, we can help to evaluate it freely for you.

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A Guideline about Legend on Printed Circuit Board

Tuesday, November 29th, 2022

Printed circuit board is used to power up the electronic devices, and the legend on its surface been known as legend text or silkscreen text to be aim at providing vital information to electronic manufacturers or end users. This post is a guideline to help you understand what information we can gain from those legends and what we need to pay attention to when design them.

A brief introduction about PCB legend

Though a printed circuit board doesn’t require any legend/text to function technically, the text provides key information to end users to test, assemble and troubleshoot, and generally we can obtain following information from the legends:

  • Branding information

This includes manufacturer’s information, serial numbers, date code and other information, which prevents the copying of design.

  • Part number provided

Part numbers are added on the circuit boards to enable replacement or design evolution whenever needed.

  • Version of product

Sometimes versions were updated, and the legend is added on the circuits to identify the specific version and backtrack the date.

  • Reference of components indicators

This may feature components information such as indicators, orientations and other information.

  • Safety Precautions

These are warning signals that are added to protect users from electric shocks. A few examples of these may include grounding, high voltage, and so on.

  • Circuit Identification

Users and designers can identify circuit names from legends to understand testing points, ground points, component interconnect, so forth.

  • Polarity indicator for certain components

Some components such as diodes, LED chips, electrolytic capacitors require to a distinguish of polarity when assembly, text legends help to indicate the right polarity to ensure assembled correctly and perform functionality when reach to consumers.

  • Authentication indication

Silkscreen text shows the boards are authenticated or conforms to certain security certification, such as RoHS, 94V-0, UL…

  • Test points and troubleshooting assistants

Help to correctly perform testing including resistance measurement, voltage measurement, function testing and so forth.  In addition, text legend enables to troubleshoot while issues or debugs happened and repair is required.

  • Component outlines indicating where components should go

Legends provides a great help during assembly process, it helps the operator quickly find where each component should be, so it is recommended to add text legends when PCB need to be assembled.

General Parameters for PCB Legend in Best Technology

To understand the capabilities of legend printing of Best Technology, here we listing some general parameters for your reference:

  • Legend colors can be white, black, green, yellow or other colors depend on customer’s preferences.
  • Legend line width is range from 5mil to 7mil
  • Text height can set at 30mil
  • Maximum text width can be 17mil
  • Printing methods are screen printing, direct legend printing and Liquid photo imaging. (Direct legend printing is commonly used by far.)

Important factors need to be considered during designing

Although legends are easy to be printed, there are still some key points need to pay highly attention when you are designing.

  • Legend orientation: To maintain a good reading appearance for user, please make sure all legends throughout the board have a same orientation.
  • Choose a standard color and shapes for marking, this is a most economy way to save cost.
  • Avoid overlapping: Overlapping is one of the most common problems that manufacturer faced. Legend always be related to PCB layout, and components reference will be also designated when circuit board layout finished. So if the legend was overlapped, it must be moved to another place and that may cause component reference was located in a wrong position, so it is always recommend to double check all the legends, to make sure they are clear and in the correct position when the whole board layout was completed.
  • Do not place the silkscreen text on all four directions, this will lead to confusions when the circuit board is undergoing repair.
  • Leave a few mils space for some common potential printing errors, this will help manufacturer to reduce the possibility of errors.

Every PCB manufacturer has its unique style and pattern when it comes to legend printing, so working files confirmation plays an important role before circuit fabrication, Best Technology gives a great respect to the original files to our customers, we won’t start production until get approval of working files from customers, so please do not worry about it if you have such concerns. In addition, as a professional printed circuit board manufacturer in Asia, we are confident that we can provide you with high quality PCB, welcome to contact us if you have PCB needs.

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Why most of PCB boards are green?

Tuesday, August 24th, 2021

You may have found such a situation, most of the PCB boards are with green colors, while other colors are relatively rare to see, do you know why?

As we know that the Printed Circuits Board consists of Solder Mask Layer, Silk screen layer, solder PAD, Copper traces, surface finishing and other parts, etc.

Among them, the solder mask refers to the part of the PCB that is covered by oil. Since most PCB boards use green oil, the part of the green oil that can be seen on the board surface is the solder mask, which play an important role during the reflow soldering process.  

green solder mask

Then why are most of the PCB boards green? The main reasons are as follows:

  1. Green is less irritating to the eyes. We all know that green is good for the eyes and can resists fatigue. So when the PCB board with green solder mask, relative production and maintenance personnel are not prone to eye fatigue when staring at the PCB board for a long time, and it is less harmful to the eyes.

2. Cost for Green oil is lower. Since green is the mainstream in the production process, the purchase of natural green oil will be larger, and the purchase cost of green solder mask will be lower than other colors. At the same time, using the same color oil in mass production can also reduce the replacement cost.

  • When the board works on the SMT soldering process,  it needs to go through the process from Tinning, post soldering and final AOI inspection. These processes all need to be optically positioned and calibrated. The green background color is better for the recognition of the instrument.
PCBA AOI testing

Okay, now, do you understand why most of PCB boards are with green colors?

Though we know green is the most common one, but other colors such as red, yellow, blue, purple, black or some other colors are okay for us to make.

solder mask colors

If you have PCB board with a special color want to make, please contact us and we will try best effort to meet your request.

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