RF circuits are designed to pass signals within a certain band. They use band pass filters to transmit signals in a so-called band of interest. The signal within a range of frequency passes through this band range, and the rest of the frequencies of the signal are filtered. A single band can be very narrow […]

OEMs continue to demand greater functionality in smaller portable and handheld products, such as wearables and IoT devices. As a result, a number of attributes are demanded these days for PCBs in smaller mobile technologies. Along with those attributes come a host of challenges in terms of layout, fabrication, and assembly, plus assuring many of […]

LEDs are the light of choice for growing numbers of applications due to their shrinking size, as well as declining cost and longer life. But LEDs pose a host of issues to the PCB layout designer including thermal management challenges. Within thermal management, there are a few other key issues to ponder. Those involve PCB […]

We’re now talking about BGA-packaged components with 4,000 or so leads or balls, 0.3mm pin pitch and below, highly component populated automatic test equipment PCBs, and ever shrinking conventional PCBs and small flex circuits for Internet of Things (IoT) and wearables. That tells you that component placement on these PCBs at the pick and place […]

With the increasing demands for wearable and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, chipmakers are scrambling to yet pack even more circuitry into even smaller component packaging. The micro ball-grid array (BGA) package is a case in point. Fig. 1 shows micro BGA-packaged devices placed on a flex circuit for a medical electronics application. These tiny […]