What is PCB & How it is Made?

Posted by Claire Smith on April 21st, 2021

A printed circuit board is the backbone of all contemporary electronic devices. Early electronic components were manufactured and connected manually using wires in a point-to-point construction. This manual construction led to errors and difficulty in scaling up the production.

Since these circuits were extremely complexed, repairing one that had been damaged was an unreliable tedious task. That was a time when the notion of printing conducting copper circuits on a non-conductive board was initiated – the first PCB connecting all components over the traces.

However, a PCB board today seems more sophisticated, tiny, and complex. Making PCB in the current era starts from a simple copper flat sheet which evolves into a sophisticated electronic device in a detailed logical manner.

How Current PCB Boards Are Made?

To start, the layer of copper foil is laminated on a flat sheet of insulating glass fiber material. The glass fiber gives mechanical help to the PCB, this glass fiber will stay with the PCB till the finish of the assembling interaction. This arrangement along with a protective aluminum sheet is first sent to the drilling

There you will find some holes known as registration holes, these holes serve as reference points for further alignment processes. Meanwhile, an engineer properly designs the circuit using computer-aided simulations.

The PCB design software generates design files called Gerber files which contain detailed 3D models of PCB, using these designs files, the drilling machine drills different holes which are used to attaching the components to the board

Later on, after drilling, the boards are properly cleaned, so that no drilling residue is left behind.

Now, the most important step in the production of these tiny and complex copper traces; the best way to achieve this is by a chemical process called Etching – where you have to cover the copper plate with a resistive mask. This resistive mask will have the same pattern of circuit you want

If you dip this arrangement into an alkaline solution at 60 to 120 degrees Celsius, the uncovered area of copper by resistive mask either gets dissolved or is etched away. After this process is complete, the protective mask is washed off as a well, thus we are left with only required traces of copper which are thoroughly tested with an optical inspection machine to ensure quality.

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