It is a series of electro chemical process which creates circuit patterns on copper by additive and subtractive methods. Learn more about the process involved in this article.

Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) are boards on which the electronic components are mounted and the connections between them are made electrically.

PCBs are commonly made of fiberglass FR4 material, but they also come in other variants like composite epoxy and ceramics. Depending on the rigidity of the base materials there are flexible PCBs, rigid PCBs, and rigid-flex PCBs. For more complex circuits which need a lot of connections between the component’s wires, will have to be routed in multiple layers of copper planes. This is achieved in multi-layer PCBs which come in 4/6/8…and all the way up to 60 layers.

The files needed for PCB fabrication are:

PCB gerber format- The Gerber file format (RS274X) is the de facto standard for Printed Circuit Board(PCB) fabrication. It is the standard file used by printed circuit board (PCB) industry software to describe the printed circuit board layers: copper layers, solder mask, legend, etc. Gerber file can be in either .rar or .zip archive when you upload the designs on our platform.

Board Outline file(.GKO) is a must as it is used for routing(cutting) the board edge. This file defines the outline of the board including any inner slots or cut-outs. It should only contain the outline data and no other data should be present.

Drill file should be in Excellon format. Non-Plated Drills can be mentioned either in board outline or in a second drill file which contains text “NPTH” in the filename.

Check the below links to know the procedure of generating Gerber files from various other CAD tools,

• Eagle (Eagle 8.5.2 and below) ; Eagle 8.6.0 and above
• kiCAD
• Allegro
• EasyEDA
• Proteus
• DipTrace
• Fritzing
• CircuitMaker
• Design Spark
• Altium
• PADS

You can also visit our Lioncircuits YouTube channel to watch videos on Gerber file generation from these CAD software.

The standard PCB Thickness is 1.6mm

Soldering of electronic components on bare pcbs are also known as PCBA or printed circuit board assembly. Surface mount devices (SMDs) are usually placed on pcbs using a pick and place machine and then sent to reflow for soldering. Through hole components on the other hand are soldered on wave soldering process.

PCB manufacturing is a multi step process involving various electrochemcial process. Here is an article which explain the pcb process step-by-step.

PCB assembly cost depends on the number of components on board and the complexitiy of components. We have an automatic quote generator to order pcba online on our platform.

PCB or printed circuit boards are bare circuit boards which have electrical connections on the board from various electronic components without the components mounted.

PCBA is the printed circuit board with electronic components soldered on it.