JAES Öğrenme

A printed circuit board is the backbone of all modern-day electronic devices. Let’s explore what a PCB is and how these tiny circuits are manufactured. Let’s go!
Early electronic components were manufactured and connected to each other manually using wires in a point-to-point construction. This manual construction led to errors and difficulty in scaling up the production. Moreover, because these circuits were extremely complex, repairing one that had been damaged was an unreliable tedious task.
In 1936, Paul Eisler, a genius engineer who worked for a newspaper company, recognized the hurdles. He invented the concept of printing conducting copper circuits on a non-conductive board, as shown here. Then connecting components over the traces. This is the very first PCB manufactured.
However, a modern-day PCB looks like this much more sophisticated, tiny, and complex. Modern day PCB manufacturing starts from a simple copper flat sheet. Let’s see how this sheet evolves into a sophisticated electronic device in a detailed, logical manner.
To start off, this layer of copper foil is laminated on a flat sheet of insulating glass fiber material. The glass fiber gives mechanical support to the PCB this glass fiber will remains with the PCB till the end of the manufacturing process. This arrangement, along with a protective aluminum sheet, is first sent to drilling. Here, some holes—called registration holes—are drilled. These holes serve as reference points for further alignment processes.
Meanwhile, an engineer properly designs the circuit using computer-aided simulations. Here is some PCB design software which generates design files called Gerber files. Gerber files contain detailed 3D models of the PCB. Using these design files, the drilling machine drills different holes, these holes are used to attach the components into the board later on.
After drilling, the boards are cleaned properly so that no drilling residue is left behind. Now c the most important step: 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 the circuit you want. Now if you dip this arrangement into an alkaline solution at 60 to120 degrees celsius the areas of copper uncovered by the resistive mask dissolves or is etched away. After this process is complete the protective mask is washed off as well thus we are left with only the required traces of copper.