In a world of ever-increasing electronic component complexity and pin count requirements for component packaging, focus is once again on the age-old question of "How do we preserve solderable surfaces between PWB manufacturing and assembly?" PCB manufacturers today are faced with the decision of which surface finish to offer their customers, while their customers struggle with choosing the best...

This paper describes several low-cost methods for fabricating flexible electronic circuits on paper. The circuits comprise i) metallic wires (e.g., tin or zinc) that are deposited on the substrate by evaporation, sputtering, or airbrushing, and ii) discrete surface-mountable electronic components that are fastened with conductive adhesive directly to the wires. These electronic circuits—like co...

For this project, a program was written which can automatically reverse-engineer a netlist of a oneor two-layer printed circuit board (PCBs) from photos of the board. Reverseengineering a printed circuit board (PCB) is useful for purposes such as repairing equipment for which component-level documentation is not available, integrating a poorly-documented board into a system, and for identifying...

Electroless nickel (Ni) immersion gold (Au), commonly referred to by the acronym ENIG, is most common protective coating applied on exposed copper (Cu) traces of printed circuit boards (PCBs). In this work, we elucidate local corrosion mechanism ENIG-Cu system applying microscopic, surface analysis and electrochemical techniques with high spatial resolution provide a comprehensive understanding...

Printed electronics are manufactured using additive methods and envisioned as "green", low-cost, energy-efficient, sustainable alternatives to present-day electronics. The present Multi-perspective Application Selection (MPAS) assessment aims assess the current state of technology evaluate products in which applications printed would be feasible. MPAS is a multi-stage tool apt for decision-maki...

We have developed technologies to embedded high-speed polymer optical interconnects on printed circuit boards for 850 nm applications. In this paper, we show results of fabricating opticalPCBs on a production scale panels in a modern HDIPCB (high-density interconnect-PCB) process environment. Impacts on board design and manufacturing were studied with the developed optical technology verif iers...