Hi A video I get often requested for is one where I go through all the various PCB manufacturing options that you'd find on a typical prototype PCB manufacturing website and what they all mean because a lot of these options can be quite bewildering if you're getting your first PCB made or yeah, or even if you've had lots of designs done. but you don't know what a lot of the various advanced options means. So I thought we'd go through these because it's rather interesting. So buckle up! Dorothy Kansas is going bye-bye now I'm going to assume that you've got your you've laid out your PCB you've generated your Gerber's correctly and I've done a video on that Here it is which I'll link in down below under the end if you haven't seen it.

Getting the PCB manufacturers part of my Nixie Tube Project Design series and this video part file was specifically focused on generating Gerber's I believe I haven't rewatched it a 42 minutes long. Geez, that's a watch, shouldn't it? Um, yeah, there's a lot involved and this video might be just as long in anyway. I Have a PCB design and Manufacturing playlist linked as well where I've got lots of things how PCBs are manufactured my incredibly popular Design for Manufacturing Series Design for Manufacturing Tutorial: Part 1: How to do penalisation and all sorts of stuff So I've got yeah 37 I Guess this will be my 38th a video on PCB design. Anyway, let's get to it now: I Don't want this video to promote any particular PCB service, so don't Please do not take this as a recommendation.

In fact the first one we're going to look at I'm only using it because it has lots of nice of various options. this company is actually which is a former advertiser on my website and forum. They've actually spammed my forums, set up sockpuppet accounts and astroturfed and tons of these PCB companies do this. The forum is practically under constant attack from PCB manufacturers and I don't know what it is, but they love the eevblog forum.

but when it's the place to, it is the place to discuss all this stuff. But yeah, there's lots of astroturfing accounts and stuff we whacker like play a whack-a-mole any I'll try not to mention them, but you'll probably get to see their names eventually. I Don't wanna go through and have to blur everything out anyway? Yeah, no recommendations here and we're just looking at the options because all the PCB manufacturers will have different various options. A lot of things they shall see will be called different names as well depending on the manufacturer and the industry often doesn't have unified terms for these sorts of things.

So yeah, you've just got to be aware of it. Anyway, let's go through when you go for a quote and online quote for example. Look, we haven't even gotten into advanced PCB or rigid Flex or these I I might have to just stick to standard PCB here cuz this video is going to be long enough anyway. So the first thing here.

this is just in the order It happens to be on this particular website in no order of importance whatsoever. Yeah, the good thing about this is that they do actually have a little info. The full board are only one type, single board or array with the same or different type. so a single piece is obviously just one.

PCB Like this that is routed either square or whatever shape. you don't have to get a square or rectangular piece to be. You can't actually define rounded out shapes which I've done in my design for manufacturing tutorial, but that's what it means. You get all individual loosey-goosey boards delivered like this.

Now the next one here is panel by customer. That's you. You've actually designed the panel and I've done videos on this. This is where you have multiple of the same board like this, but you actually put them.

You've done all the work for them. To actually penalize this, you've specified either V grooving or routing channels or a combination of both. and you have you know you've got your individual panel size and you do this. If you want to like, go into volume manufacturer for example.

You usually wouldn't go to this sort of effort. If you just like doing one-off boards, you just get them individual boards. But when you're getting them manufactured for any sort of lowest volume production to high-volume production, you want to control that panel yourself. You want an exact thing and to meet your exact requirements.

I've even done like a video and automated testing. You can add like little test sockets to the side of your panel and all that sort of jazz. So when you go from single piece to panel by customer, you'll see that things have changed. It's telling them that they can expect all sorts of routing and V grooving and stuff like that.

And here we go. and panel as V scoring. So that's when you just put it through once again. I I've done all videos on this so you have to go look up these terms for yourself.

So either your board is just V scored which is the simplest method if you're good. Often if you just want to do it simple. if you just want a big panel and you want you know 20 of these boards for example and they're all square like this or rectangular. very simple.

you might just do V scoring. Which means that you can just snap them off easily like that. So V scoring or the other option is panel as tab routing or just routing. Don't worry about the word tab, it's it's kind of.

It's the same thing. It just means that they get a routing drill bit and they like route out slots and things like that. Then you have to put little mouse bytes in there to try and snap out the boards. anyway.

that's the detail or you've got a combination of both of those. You just have to tell them which one you're using. Now this one here is interesting which could be manufacturer specific. You may not see this on any other website X out allowance in panel.

That means if you get a bad PC because these are all flying probe tested electrically tested at the end. and if you if there's a bad PCB in the panel, if you don't accept that, if you don't accept this thing, if you don't go I accept that and I could potentially get bad PCBs which they'll usually mark, they might have you know they might put an X through it or they might do something. Usually manufacturing processes are really good these days and you're unlikely to get any bad individual piece of B's But remember, this is an optimized, fast turn prototype manufacturing process so less care is generally taken when they're manufacturing these boards. This is why you can get a PCB like this for you know, two bucks, right? It is because they're a bit loosey-goosey with their manufacturing.

Yeah, and this is why they'll typically give you five for the same price because they might put you know ten of them on there. And if five are good, they're five past the electrical testing, they'll send you the five. So if you want an guaranteed perfect panel using this prototype PCB Services and this is what we're talking about here. Generally you won't get these sort of pages with the ordering a production PCB panel, Usually you'll email them and you'll send that, email them your Gerber files and you'll actually include in your email or maybe even on your Gerber file itself all of the specifications.

All of these specifications that you want here. for example. All this sort of stuff will be like in manual notes that they have to read all all these prototype ones. They all use this automated form, which just means that they can.

It automates the whole process so that they can then put similar boards. Because when you get your boards manufactured like this, then they're going to put them on the same panel with dozens of other designs. so they've got to make sure they all all those designs match the specific requirements for that panel. and then they send you your individual ones and they break them all out and then send them to the individual customer.

So if you're wanting your own custom panel, that's kind of like they might even do a board specifically for you. So it's gonna cost more. And what they're saying is if you don't accept that you could potentially have some a couple of bad boards in that batch, then we're gonna charge you. in this case, 30 percent up to thirty percent more.

So yeah, so if you do not accept it, then you'll find that your price will a please input length. Let's say we want two hundred by two hundred. With five panels like this, we can get our quote over here like this and you'll see that if we accept this. got it's currently seventy four dollars for five? Wow And if we accept that, it's cheaper.

see so they've charged us more because we accept that you may get a couple of rejects, but it's unlikely. Today's manufacturing process is pretty good. even these prototype one. And as with all these options, they may or may not add cost depending on the manufacturer.

So in this particular case it looks like v-groove and tab routing doesn't add anything to the cost. So beauty you know you might add those in because they don't cost anything. I'm from this particular manufacturer so now our next option here is different designs in the panel. In this particular case, for automated production, for example, they're all the same and generally going to be all the same board.

Sometimes you might put different if your design has say three different sub assembly boards. Your panel might actually contain three. Those three different sub assembly our boards. It depends on how you want to get manufactured.

There's pros and cons in all those ways, but basically asking how many different designs do you have in there because we're going to charge or more So $66 over here we change that to two and we recalculate. And where it's $79 Three designs calculate 91. It's going up and up and up. So they're going to charge you more with different designs.

That's because then they have to program in. Well, there's various reasons, but one of them you like. like all the flying probe tests might have to be different. For example, there's more work and time and effort required in not actually in the manufacturing process itself but all the other fiddling around that they do to have to design and fit this in and also track different boards and things like fly in probe test in programming and all that sort of stuff takes extra time and effort so they gonna charge you for that.

So if you do need you know three or five different boards at the same time. it may actually be cheaper just to get them all done as single pieces and and then add them as separate designs than it is to get a panel by customer for example. So yeah, six of one half dozen of the other. It's kind of vary by manufacturer and next it's if you want the company to do the panel itself.

and once again, as I said, you wouldn't do this for production. For production boards, you want a specific controlled board that you control all the parameters of, then you can give to your assembler and you know the precise thing. You don't want them to penalize it willy-nilly because it may not have the tooling holes required, may not have the fiducials required, and all sorts of stuff which I've designed Dunham design for manufacturing tutorial. But if you just got your one design like this but you want you know 20 of these boards and you want them on this one panel or you know with V scoring or whatever and you want them just first just from a handling point of view, then that's fine.

Just get the manufacturer to do that, but you certainly wouldn't do it for production and then breakaway rail that would be an outside rail on your board which you know all this outside stuff. It just allows them room to just put, especially if you're doing various different designs and stuff like that. So you just tell whether or not you want that. Is there any price difference? No.

But here is notes where you have to tell them what you want so you might go a You know, five by five panel with these scoring please? you know something like that. So you want five by five boards? Are you? You want twenty-five of them and you just want them v scored because you can do it because they're all just rectangular like this and then you'd set that as V scoring over here as well. Now we've got the dimensions of the board here now of course and that is going to determine the primary determinate of the cost of your PCB because these prototype PCB services. they're all based on sharing one big panel.

The manufacturer will have a good. It's quite large, quite large panel size, and they can fit you know and often hundreds of designs. If you're talking, you know this size border would've easily get hundreds of these different designs on the one panel. and this is how they can manufacture these for two dollars and seemingly make a profit.

Although I'm still debating whether or not I doubt whether or not some of these piece of big companies make money from these prototypes. They might. But I think they make their money on their volume production manufacturing stuff that have better margins on those Anyway there. It's amazing how they've optimized their services these days for the cost when I was a boy.

Geez, don't get me started. Anyway, so that is either the dimensions of your single board or the dimensions of your panel by customer. But if you're choosing their penalisation by them, you would put in your individual single size board and then they'll calculate how many you know the space required and they'll quote accordingly. Now here's the number of layers of course you're used to.

You know your standard two layer. PCB In fact, I'm actually surprised that the one layer is cheaper than two layers here. I Would have thought they would have standardized on a two layer process and the one layer. In fact, in the past, I've been charged more for a single layer board from a manufacturer because they have to because they their stock is actually a double sided board for example, on the panel and then they have to etch away and you're like all the copper on the top side of that to get rid of it.

especially on a shared our panel like this. but maybe they do shared panel one like they. Actually this stock must be a one layer board. so fair enough.

That's how they can do it cheaper anyway. And of course you're only gonna get an even number of layers like this because well, they you can get a three layer board or a five layer board or a seven layer board manufactured. It's not a usual process so they've got to stack them up differently and it's just you can get it done, but generally like it's ever going to cost you more Just from the annoyance point of view, you know if you need a seven layer board, you just get an eighth layer manufactured. Let's just have a look at the difference in price here.

One layer $99 Two layer, one hundred and Thirteen dollars in 24 hours - this is insane, right? A four layer board is going to take four to five days as opposed to 24 hours because they do those less frequently. Their most common is one end two layer boards. so 236. That's still too cheap for a 4 layer 4 even 418 bucks, trust me, is dirt cheap for a 6 layer board.

Eight Eight Layers 490. There's hardly it's we're not getting much difference. Are we Six Ninety Eight? We jump up 12 layers Nine Fourteen layer boards. Like you know I've I've paid many thousands of dollars to get my boards a single board.

One board turned like an eighth layer of ten layer board turned in quick time. It's just anyway. Yeah, it goes up Seven eight days because they don't do these as often. Nine, Ten Thirteen fourteen and also takes extra time and effort to do I as the layers get up every step they have to repeat.

repeat, repeat, repeat now. Next up, we've got the material here and this is the fiberglass. the resin, fiberglass and material that it's made of. Or it can be made from other stuff as well.

And up Some PCB manufacturers won't give you an option for especially for prototypes. Services like this, they'll only give you a plain vanilla Fr4. Now if R4 is actually flammability rating for it's like just infinity. you can think of it as just plain vanilla.

You know, woven fiberglass? It's It's sort of the base standard that you know 95% of boards are manufactured from. Oh by the way, if you choose one layer up here, you do actually get a Cho and extra choice pops down of where which side do you want it from. So that tells me that they're pro. They are.

They edging that away. Do you want soda? My silkscreen Anyway, most people don't get one layer, most people just get a two layer made. Now if you choose Fr4, you might get these options here. which is the glass transition temperature or TG it's called and in this particular case of given three options TG is 130 to 140 which is 130 to 140 degrees Celsius or 150 to 160, 170 to 180 degrees Celsius And what this glass transition temperature means is that at if your board is operating in this particular case, if your board was operating at a hundred and thirty degrees 130 to 140 degrees Celsius your glass fiberglass can actually transition from a glass material to a molten type material and that can have you know adverse effects on you haha a circuit and you don't have to worry about this from a like a reflow sort of.

You know when your PCB goes through the reflow oven for example, it's going to be at a higher temperature. But that's not really the drama here. The drama is the operating temperature of the PCB and of course hundred thirty degrees. If your circuits getting a hundred and thirty degrees, you'd better know what.

If your PCB is getting a hundred and thirty degrees, you'd better know what the hell you're doing anyway. So this might be only relevant to you know, automotive, industrial, high-temperature type operating environments and things like that. Generally you just got to choose that because you will get charged more looking under and third dollars and 173. So unless you had a real specific requirement, no costs difference.

II might as well go for the 170 180 anyway. So yeah, you wouldn't touch that unless you have a very specific requirement. Now the other type of PCB is an aluminium backed one and this is only in fairly recent years that you've started getting these. Usually that was like a special production option.

For example, you had to go to a specialist manufacturer. Now you can just get it and you doesn't check out option on your prototype. PCB Now an aluminium back to PCB is just what its name says It's it's a backing of aluminium on the bottom of a certain thickness and then you've got your PCB basically stacked on top of that. This particular one here only shows the one layer of copper, but you'd have your two or your four layer PCB and then a layer of aluminium on the back.

So what would you use these for? Well, LEDs Classic example, right? Because you have to extract the heat out of the bottom over or any sort of you know if you had a power package or or something like that. but you know. Common requirement these days is LED to get the you get all the heat out the back it's a heat sink and then you can attach it to a bigger heatsink, etc. etc.

So yeah, you know if you need that, you're gonna know it. And in this case, well they give you two different options of the thermal conductivity. Do you want one? what? milli? Kelvin or do you want two watts per milli? Kelvin The higher they are the well, the lower the thermal conductivity, that more you're gonna pay for it. In this case is not a huge amount of difference there so you know if you're serious about getting your heat out, you'd go for the higher value.

Now the next one is what they're calling Rogers here and Rogers is a company but it might be called say controlled Impedance material or control impedance PCB or something like that. Rogers is a company which actually manufactures a ton of different so that you can't just say I want Rogers material that that just makes no sense at all. They have all these different products, all these different laminates and it's just. it's just absolutely ridiculous.

We could go into these that we could do a one-hour video and all the different types of dielectric material that all these but basically instead of your standard Fr4 PCB Rogers are a company. that's specially they're number one in the industry. There are others and they manufacture very controlled dielectric PCBs and you would use these for like you know, really advanced RF and military applications, high-end high-speed circuit design and stuff like that. although I've done 10 Gigabit Ethernet for example, on standard Fr for PCB you know you don't necessarily have to go to a controlled Impedance or Rogers brand PCB for that, but they have dozens and dozens and dozens of different types and look, they can part and you know the dielectric impedance is all controlled to within 0.05 and up to 2.5 gear.

You know they specify all these things. So really, if you know that you need this sort of stuff, you're probably not gonna watch this tutorial video. So yeah, it's you know it's it's really advanced stuff. Anyway, they only carry two of these different ones in stock so we could check out.

you know, for double O three C So here you go for double O 3 C This is the one I properly woven glass-reinforced hydrocarbons, ceramics with the electrical performance of PTFE woven glass and the manufacturer ability of epoxy glass and this is just one of the dozen different types that they have. Anyway, these are the controlled impedance dissipation factor of point double O to 7 at 10 gig for example, low thermal expansion and things like that. And yeah, anyway, you can get the data sheets for these things. so it's basically just high frequency material.

So just think anything high frequency RF really high advanced controlled impedance stuff, then you're gonna want you know to specify precisely the material that you're going to get. Otherwise, you just order Fr4 Yeah, they will. Often the manufacturer will give you the spec of their PCB and well let's try and find that actually shall we. And if you drill down in the web sites, you should be able to find these specifications for their various our board capabilities and things like that.

So you know they'll tell you all that of the thickness tolerances of their boards. the thickness tolerances of the like this solder mask their minimum tres minimum space Vmm hole size This is all manufacturing stuff I've done in the design for manufacturing tutorial but you should be able to find a the various the specs in this case the dough if you're doing controlled impedance the specifications for the Fr4 prepar'd type right? So if you're using the prepreg, prepreg is just the PCB material the Fr4 material and prepreg is just the name for if you're doing a you know an 8 layer board. A prepreg is just one of the individual fiberglass layers because they'll manufacture them as separate boards and then sandwich and glue them all together. So depending on the type, here's a typical dielectric constant, but for just regular if our for stuff they don't tell you any tolerance on that.

They just say it's normally four point six or as you know four point oh five. but this you'd have to look up this specific type. You could probably get a datasheet for that and and they might even give you a full layer control stack up. For example, I'm over on the Jl C PCB site.

Now once again not a recommendation and you know they might have a like for a 1.6 millimeter. PCB They tell you the prepreg type and they'll tell you the copper thicknesses and all that sort of stuff and they'll tell you you know you can do controlled impedance calculations here. it is impedance calculator so there you go. So I want 50 Ohms please.

And I've got a four layer board and it's one point six millimeters and it's on the outer layer and single-ended and differential. This is actually really quite good. Recommend! Even if you don't use this service, you can use their calculator online here and the specific dielectric material. You can order this specific type and then you can view the stack up of that individual material.

Not all manufacturers have this sort of stuff, but yeah, that's that's really quite nice. So if you're doing controlling penis core PCB you don't necessarily have to go to that are more expensive and super controlled Rogers material. You can just do it with regular Fr4. but if you're doing that, make sure your manufacturer has all that information of our in this particular case, it's harder to find it for this company PCB way than it is to find that Jlc have much better for in this particular case.

For this now we've got an option here and it doesn't seem to let us check it anyway. it's called HDI or one with blind buried vias HDI As high density interconnects it may be called, it may just simply buried Blind Buried Vias on another manufacturers site HDI and it has a specific connotation industry. It means you know if you're manufacturing a mobile phone PCB You know really tight tolerances and you've got blind varied vias and all that sort of stuff. you want a high density interconnect option and it's not giving it to us.

and I Don't know why it's always available for four layers or more. Okay, so we need four layers do now. The only extra difference they give this with HDI Here you might notice it pops up the thickness of the immersion gold on this. So yeah, that's the only difference.

But once again, other manufacturers may give you different options for HDI. But basically, you're doing blind buried vias. What are they? So what is a blind buried via? Well, they're two different things and once again, I've done videos on this but your traditional through-hole board for example. this is a one, two, three, four, five, six layer PCB So if you just choose your Fr for option, you'll just get your normal through holes and the hole will go through all of the different layers and then optionally connect into all the inner layers depending on how you've specified your goba and everything but a blind via is one that starts from the top or from the bottom and does Inc only goes partially into the board like this.

why would you want to do this? It's because so that you've got the routing space all under here like this so that you can, you know you don't have to route around that hole. For example, you can just go right under it. so there's big advantages. and you don't chop up ground planes and things like that.

Very important for like a really controlled impedance. Um, you know, high frequency boards and things like that. So that's a blind either from the top or from the bottom there and a buried is one that's just buried in the internal layers. Because as I said, all these boards are manufactured on a pre peg.

so they manufacture this inner layer here. For example, with these blind, Vias will be manufactured as a double layer board a very thin one with a very thin prepreg Fr4 metier, Raja's material or whatever it is material and Polly put the kettle on material and then they'll manufacture those and then stack them up together so you can't actually have blind and very buried vias on just any layers. Willy-nilly there has to be a manufacturing reason for it so you can't go all I Want a buried via From this layer here to this one, and also from this layer down to this one here. they're just gonna come back and go.

Well, they probably can, but they're gonna charge you a lot more for it. Um, you're really only going to this sort of stage if you have a really dense PCB Hence, you might have a hasty you know if you're designing a mobile phone. If you look at those, they don't have just holes going all the way through. They've got blind and buried Vias all over the place.

And if you want a very quick example of this, let's look at. This is like an eleven hundred and fifty something pin VGA package on here and these are this: doesn't use blind buried Vias so you've got to break out each one of these individual pads. Those red ones. There are the pads for the BGA And we don't use blind buried Vias so each individual layer is is really like severely chopped up.

You see how this ground plane is chopped up. With all these vias going through there, you don't necessarily have to chop it up like that. If you use blind buried Vias, you could have a nice and nicer big solid ground plane in there and you get extra routing density as well. See, for example, like where we're trying to route out these traces here.

for example, right out like this, you can see that we can only fit one trace between there because all of these vias are in the way. Get out of the way, get out of the way. so you might use blind buried vias and then you'd be able to get more of your inner layer traces out on that one layer. it's it's a routing thing.

And our last material. Geez, How long have we been going Because this is a big thing. a a copper base material. It's the same as aluminium base except you've got a copper base and well, depending on your thermal performance.

once again, one watt per Mille Kelvin a to optimum Millie Kelvin depends on what you want to do with your board. So yeah, oh, you mean your more copper. Take your pick. Same thing though.

So you've chosen your PCB material. That was a drama. Then you've chosen your type and all that sort of stuff. Now you've got your thickness of course is standard size these 1.6 millimeter.

Now the thickness it'll tell you for the finished PCB So that includes all of the solder mask and everything else. So if you don't order solder mask you might actually it depends. you might actually get did usually a thinner PC because you'll be sharing the panel with somebody else. You've got no solder mask.

They're going to be manufacturing that one prototype panel with the solder must Because everyone most other people are going to want solder mask. You're the you know weirdo who doesn't want solder mask top and bottom so have over thickness that solder mask is and you could probably get that from our information over here Did we know they're not gonna tell us the thickness of the solder mask anyway? no it's half Abby's dick but it all adds up when you're doing this. then if you're if you really want that one point six millimeters using it for some specific mechanical thing because you've got some press, fit, a connection or like something else or like a multimeter. for example the 121 GW There was a a change as very minor change in the thickness of the PCB from the supplier.

We didn't know about it so our our switch our rotary switch on. There it is reliant to. you know the force of the contacts is reliant upon a controlled thickness of PCB and when that's out by just a smidgen then you know it can cause potential issues, not widespread issues, but it can cause you know a one in a thousand to fail or something like that. So yeah it's it's a problem.

So if you want controlled thickness you probably wouldn't be using this prototype service. Anyway, you'd go to them and say I Want The most important requirement is one point six millimeters plus minor ended specified plus minus 0.01 a millimeter or whatever it is, you would specify the finished thickness and that generally will not include the silkscreen that will be just the solder mask. The next is the minimum track and space and this is the next most important requirement. And traditionally when you've ordered boards, what do they care about? They care about the thickness of the board, the number of layers, and what your clearances are ie.

your track space it's called or it might be called clearance or something like that. and the standard one is six mil, six mil, sixth our sixth out. Yes, they still use Imperial measurements for track and space and some manufacturers they might. they might have metricated.

but me being an old-school designer I am still using our six six For example, when I was making my own boards at home with the photo, chemical, etching process and stuff. I Could typically get down to a date something like that for a double-sided board, but I Love that you say, do you save any cost there? No, You know you don't save any cost, but your costs will probably go up if you want five five, Yes. So if you want a slightly better tolerance and that means track space, so 5,000 mm track width that you can have on your PCB before they'll throw it back at you and reject it and say sorry because they'll check your Gerber's before they come in. They've got automated software to do this and if your traces if you specified six six and then you've routed your boards with five mil or five fell with the traces, then they're going to come back at you and say wah wah wah wah sorry, we're not going to manufacture that bugger off or they might Sometimes they might actually increase it without even telling you.

And I don't like that. I've done a whole video on that and the next one is spacing so it shows you here. If you've got two traces like this, the distance, the gap between two individual traces, and once again, they might change that without telling you. But a good PCB supply should not do that.

So if they're changing stuff without telling you, ditch them for someone else. Now when I was a boy hole size 0.3 millimetres cheese, you'd pay a fortune for 0.3 millimeters. That was advanced stuff. Now it's like it's standard for you know your 2 dolla board.

By the way, we're up to $52 here. Like you know, if we went by a 50 by 50 millimeter board for example, then it's the price is $16 like four five boards. Come on, come on, what world are we living in? This is insane Anyway, with 0.3 millimeter holes, that's the minimum but it doesn't actually say it here but that will be usually be a finished hole size. so though if you specify at 0.3 millimeter hole they might drill it to 0.35 millimeters and then when they played it through, that plating adds thickness to give your finished value and you don't have to worry about that.

If you specify a three millimeter or a one millimeter hole, that's what you get. plus minus a certain tolerance, they will. Their software will automatically expand that drilling to take the plate in into account and you'll see that they don't even give us an option to go 2.8 millimeter hole as a minimum to save a bit more cost so that we can get no drill, can we? It's the same cost even if you don't drill it because you share in a panel with everyone else. They have to drill holes for everyone else, so you're paying for that cost, so you may as well get your holes get your holes for free.

although you'll probably find. yep, look. Price: Oh Practically doubled there for going from point three to 0.25 because that's a special print process. They used a finish thinner drill bits.

they're more expensive, they break more often so they go through more so they're gonna charge you for that. Or you know, when you start getting down to these sizes, you start talking micro vias and and like laser drilled holes and stuff like that. So anyway, they might. They might do point 1 5 mechanically, but they could laser them as well.

Depends. So yeah, we've gone from 16 dollars up to one hundred and sixty one dollars and in and our timers increased from three to four days there. Anyway, let's go right back just for kicks. A single PCB But five of them.

We're only talking five dollars three to four days fr for one point, six millimeters 6/6 out traces. But look, it doubled to thirty bucks and then from fifty-three up to one hundred and thirteen and our days is increased as well. Because well, you're not going to share the panel with Joe Bloggs So they're going to do like a special run for these annoying people who work there three three sour traces, then if we want our three three with point one, five millimeters, 161 bucks, thank you. but that's still too cheap.

Unbelievable. And then by default, they've given solder mask colors. Not all manufacturers will have all the same colors. Well, they might only give you you know, red and green or something like that or white.

And so green is the most popular of course. and that's 24 hours. So just changing your silkscreen color can change it from 21 for hours, two, three, four days. I Don't know why why it was selected? Maybe I Don't know if green should be default? So yeah, because not many people want white so you don't get on the next available panel.

you might have to wait a couple of days until they get a whole bunch of orders together so that they can put them together on the one panel and they might find that nobody else you know. you might order blues for example. and they might find that Oh God Nobody else has come through with blue Green requests in the last five days. Geez, oh man, you factor just your panel and they might lose money on that.

For example, because you've selected blue anyway. Matt Green. You know if things like that, matte black and matte black? Trust me. This black over here.

this will be gloss black. Do Not use gloss black. It's a blight on humanity. Do Not use it.

Matt If you want black, get matte black anyway. So if you're picky about your colors, We've now gone from five dollars or one for five boards. So one dollar per board just choosing matte black, we've got up to thirty eight bucks. That's common.

Oh, this is actually smart. If you choose matte black, it doesn't let you have a black silk screen. That makes sense. I Just want to see if they did it anyway.

I Mean generally you won't save any money. And silk screens? they only have white or black. Other manufacturers might give you many more options than that. Do you want gold fingers? Generally No.

If you want gold fingers, you're gonna know it. And what. I Gold fingers. Well, if you focus your bastard there we go.

Gold fingers. That's our next option. This is for card edge connectors. It'll actually tell you over here.

it should. the gold-plated terminal of card edge connectors. So unless you're doing plug in boards like this, why is this different? Because you will see our finish. We've got gold down here, right? Gold Option which we'll get to next, but this is specifically a separate process for gold fingers like this.

Now these have a durability requirement cuz you're plugging cards in all the time so this will be a harder gold. It'll be a, you know, a nickel gold II pardon in process or whatever to make them more durable. So in terms of if you order gold which was showing a minute, that's just soft gold. It's not suitable.

So if you're designing these card edge connectors, you really should spare a fire that you've got gold fingers. and they will do a separate process for just these gold fingers. so that will actually cost you How much is going where our boards are? Eight bucks. That's gonna cost us two hundred and fifty seven dollars.

So two hundred and fifty bucks more just if you've got a board which has gold fingers. Because somebody has to take these boards and do an entirely separate process for that. So it is no wonder that's still cheap, right? But yeah, you'll pay for that. And do you want beveling? beveling is you can't see it.

But they're bald edges. beveled edges like that so that it's not just square on the top that helps insert the card in. Do you want that or not? You'll pay more for that. Yes.

And you can specify the degree. No, you won't pay more. Oh, that's pretty neat. There you go.

They've already here. They pay more for that. That's nice. anyway.

You can specify the angle of the taper on there. now. Surface finish. This is one of the next big things.

one of the main, you know four or five requirements that most manufacturers will ask you for and once again we have to go through each individual option. So buckle up. Now this is an example of hustle or hot air surface leveling. This is just basically a solder on top of your pads, right? So this is this thing we're talking about.

Now the surface finish is for your exposed copy, your exposed pads. not just pads, but exposed ground planes. or you know, heatsink pads or anything like that. So if you just want you know, this is your generic standard thing.

It's just sold a coat like this. It's just if you can have bare copper as will go into but then it tarnishes easily. So this is your generic one. Hot air surface leveling that is hassle.

and if they if you want them to use lead-based solder then you choose lead you want lead-free Does it charge extra? No, they don't So most of the time you're going to go with that now. Immersion gold or electroless nickel. Immersion gold is the actual process you want gold-plated pads and that's really nice. and it goes up from eight dollars, eight dollars for your five boards to 41.

But if you've got a BGA for example, then it's important to have a gold level because when you have your solder coated hot air surface leveling like this, the pads. They're a bit lumpy, bumpy and if you've got a BGA your BGA may not sit flat on there like if you've got you know, a thousand pads as I showed before Thousand pins, Thousand balls for example as I show before. It's important for them to all sit flat on there so that you've got better chance of getting a nice controlled process on your reflow if your balls on there. So Electroless Nickel, E-motion Gold or Emotion Gold is an option you want.

If you want a nice flat piece of it or you just like gold-plated padge, you might have like lot lots of exposed copper and you just want to you know have a wank and show the customers that all this is easin this a nice board, it's got gold on it and yeah it's neat and if you get your nickel emotion Gold you can choose option not always depends on the manufacturer, choose your thickness your gold plating thickness. So forty-one dollars should go up Sixty-four dollars Eighty nine dollars because they physically using more gold now o SP Here this is a bit of an oddball option. Not all manufacturers will have this, but that you've made due to legal requirements require this. It stands for organic solderability.

Preservatives say that three times quickly and what it is is your bare copper and then they organically grow a a treatment on top of that to prevent tarnishing. So I said no. You do the hassle thing to prevent tarnishing of your bare exposed copper for example. So your PCBs last longer in stock for example.

then you can get them assembled easily, but you may not want the even if it's lead-free Okay, some of the reduced and reduction of hazardous substances. the OHS requirement in various site countries may require a that you used less. Even if it's lead-free you use less of that and OSP is just an option. Forty-one bucks.

Is it same as got No. It's cheaper than gold because gold is expensive. You don't currently like 2,200 Aussie bucks and troy ounce that is anyway. OSP is.

Yeah, it's just another process. Usually you'd only use this if you had some sort of legal requirement or company policy to use this instead of hot air surface-level in. Now the next one is hard gold. and as I said, that's what you'll get on these edge connectors here.

But what if you want it all over your board, why would you want it all over your board? Well, because you know you're just get a hard-on for boards I Guess get it harden hard gold. I'm here all week. Um, yeah. and then you get the option of what type of it goes goes up to a hundred eighty bucks by the way because it's more expensive.

Um, and then you can choose different options Wow Is it going to a price? So price is going to go up two hundred and seventy-five bucks if you really want the harder, harder, thicker, thicker gold gold all the way. So why might you want hard gold on your Pcp? Well, there's probably lots of obscure reasons you might want to, Of course, the gold for the the surface leveling properties, but generally you might have like contacts on your actually on the surface of your board and you don't want them to wear out and things like that fit. There's some particular obscure reason you might want hard gold on all your pads, but generally, no, it's not something you'd choose. Next up, we got immersion silver and why might you use this instead of gold? Well, once again, it comes down to the reduction of hazardous substances, there rose requirement and emotion.

Silver is better than the OSP so it's going to have longer survivability. Like before you assemble boards that survives multiple reflows. It has some like it, especially if you've got silver loaded solder as well. Because you can get different types of solder, Some of them, especially for surface mount stuff, have a likely a 2% is it might be a typical figure.

So, silver added to the solder. For example, a lot of surface mount components actually have a fraction of silver in in their end caps. Like surface mount caps, for example, they might have it in there and you might want to match those for specific manufacturing requirements. It's probably a few other niche reasons FreeMotion silver.

but yeah, because you can specifically buy silver lode soli, you might have a company policy or some other requirement in aerospace or something like that. you have to solder and all your boards must have immersion silver finish for example to match all of your surface components. And and it comes down to metallurgy. And or you know, when you're like if you're still in serious aerospace stuff or something, you're trying to match all your medals and I did.

Yeah, we won't go into it anyway. it's an option. The last one really is any Pig I Want any Pig finished please? So what is it? Well, it's similar to gold up here and it's got 38 bucks. this one any Pig It's expensive 153 bucks.

thank you very much because it contains multiple layers of metal. It contains well. you've got your copper and then nickel, palladium, and gold. It's got to be more better.

So I'm not sure if I mentioned before, but the emotion gold is actually not just gold over copper. They actually put a nickel layer first on top of the copper and then the gold. but the any Pig version adds a P What is there? It is there P P for palladium in there. So they sandwich the palladium between the gold and the nickel and then you'd see the copper, nickel, palladium gold like that on your board and what that stops is often with, especially with your cheaper gold.

Emotion: Go! You can see that your pads turn sort of like a darker or black color and they can sort of really tarnishing right? because Gold doesn't tarnish. But what can happen is that the gold it can attack the nickel and it starts making you traces black and there's various reasons and the the palladium wedge between them will actually prevent that. and if you want if you have a specific requirement for that then you're going to pay extra for it and you might choose that if you have like a die bonded chip on board. What you have to do wire bonding over your any Pig option is just going to give you a better controlled process for doing the wire bonding and stuff like that and for multiple reflows.

and there's a couple of other niche reasons you might want to add that palladium layer in there, but generally if you know that once again, you're not going to be watching this tutorial. And last but not least, we have plain Owen playing copper. Please sir, just plain vanila. Thank you very much, but you're actually gonna pay for it.

Look 38 bucks for your five boards as opposed to five bucks feet. Like, why do you pay more? It's because once again, you share the prototype panel with everyone else everyone else wants. They're just the regular hot air surfaced level. So plain copper.

You're the oddball because they basically have to process the entire board with everyone's over. They can't just mask out your individual. well, that's might be how they do it. Or maybe they combine all of the designs together that asked for playing copper.

Do we have extra time on there? Yeah, 24 hours goes two, three, four days so they might combine all the different ones or they might mask it out. I Don't know the manufacturing process you know for this particular manufacturer for that, but maybe you could mask it out. But anyway, you got to pay more if you want playing copper. There's not really any huge advantage to playing copper.

You might have it for some metallurgical solder specific reason that you have, but the problem is playing copper is going to tarnish. so you have to either clean your board first before you assemble it or assemble it really quick, but by the time it's shipped to you, it's probably already tarnished. Now for your video process, it's important. Do you want tinted vias? Do you want your V is not covered or unattended? Viers Or do you want plugged vias and I Like like this note here because I was going to mention this for Gerber files.

This choice is useless. It will be made according to the files as default beauty because you don't want that. Don't touch my Gerber's I've done a t-shirt somewhere. Don't touch my Gerber's Thank you very much.

Just specify if you specify tented vias in your Gerber's that's what you're going to get. And here's an example of tented vias. You can see the vias are under there. Oh yeah, they got the little individual.

but the-- you have the solder mask covering over them so we can actually go into the individual video and we're at the design stage and say I Want and like you can force tinting on top like this Or you can specify or you can get rules from the rules or whether we weren't going to it. Anyway, we can specify the expansion value of plus two for example. and if we go to our 3d view, we'll find that Bingo! there is Elvia. It is now untended, so the soda Marcy in this case.

the blue solder mask is not covering over that via. Now for larger sized holes, for example, you can't just magically cover them over with the solder mask. It doesn't work like that so you might have to plug the vias first and then tent over the top for large holes. and that's why we had the plugged option there.

You can see underneath the BGA here that we have. then you don't want this because then you can easily bridge over. You can have like the solder paste could easily bridge over and short out from your pad to your via. For example, if you didn't control your solder paste well enough your ball came down and that's spread.

used all out. you could actually get a bridging over there. So that's why you tent your Vias. That's one of the reasons and one of the reasons why you'd leave them unattended.

Well, you can probe them. easy to probe and easy to put mods solder mud wise into. you. don't have to skidding there few scalpel and scrape off the solder mask and things like that.

So yeah. pros and cons. But anyway, if you like plug in its gonna cost you five bucks to 113 bucks. Thank you very much.

Oh yeah, well after our last option, at least for this manufacturer, your copper thickness. Now you standard PCB for the outer layers. it might be different. For the inlays is one ounce copper.

So what that means is one ounce of copper per square foot. Yes, they work in old-school That's just what it is. Don't play me one ounce of copper per square foot. That's basically you think of it as the thickness.

so this is 35 it. You can get a translation shot. I've got one on my piece on my micro ruler. Here there it is.

I've got a chart there. ounces, copper, ounces, two microns. So a 1 ounce copper is 35 microns and a half ounce copper. They don't give you a half ounce copper option, but if you do a four layer board or a multi-layer board, often the internal copper.

layers might be half ounce. That is quite common and the outer ones might be one ounce. so that's the thickness of the copper. Why might you want to change that? Because you have higher current carrying capacity.

If you've got a really like a high current power supply, for example, you might go for your 2 ounce copper and you know you can go up to this manufacturer with this prototype. Service only has 13 ounces, but you might go up to like a hundred ounce or something like you know, insane like that if you're working on some massive big industrial high current you know, coil gun or something like the array or gun or something like that. Yeah, yeah, you might be going for your thicker copper, but generally you know, like one or two ounce copper if you go to two ounce. how much does it cost? Thirty four bucks.

Three ounces. An oddball one. So he jumps up to 187. Nobody's asking for three ounce copper for example.

Wouldn't surprise me if 4 ounces cheaper. No, it's the same. Basically the same cost. Yeah, because most people if they want thicker copper, you just go I have two ounce please instead of one ounce.

So of course you're thinking of copper. You lower your resistance for a given trace size and we can use our Saturn PCB calculator for this. I Highly recommend this. It's free.

It's it's just absolutely brilliant. It's how I would design I Was going to design a a calculator system like this and then I saw this one I went. It's exactly how I do it anyway. it's very comprehensive so we can go into conductor properties here for example.

So let's use a big beefy hundreds our trace here. You know you've got big hundredths our tracing your power supply and you'll notice that conductor DC resistance is for a hundred for a one inch long is 2.7 million for 1 ounce copper. But if you go up to 2 ounce copper, there you go. It's one point eight millionths.

Beautiful. Low resistance, less loss, less heat. Oh, that's what it says. Now do you see the really annoying text on top of this PCB here: I Hate those things.

This is a PCB manufacturers code so that when they snap all the panel, especially when they share in a panel like this with 100 other designs, they have this marker identifier that identifies your boards so that they can cut it out and ship you the correct board. and if you don't want that added like if you don't want them to ruin your board, it could be in the copper. it could be on the silkscreen. It could be whatever you know.

So if you've got a nice front panel or you're using your piece of B as a front panel for examples, done a video on that then you can like you don't want them to add this text on your nice front panel so say no. I Do not want that please and they're probably going to charge you more for it. Yeah, they probably check. Yeah, three.

Three bucks extra for it. Thank you very much. So yeah it's just extra hassle on but if you don't want them, you know. mucking up your boards and tell them and you thought we were finished.

No, no, it's how long's this video? Our half now already? First of all, appealable solder mask on the top or bottom. As its name says, you can actually peel off the solder mask. It's designed to mask off specific sections your board to protect them from wave and a reflow and other manufacturing problems. You don't want solder to stick to there and but you want to peel it off afterwards to protect a various party aboard.

and we won't go and do a whole video on that. but yet, do you want that or not Top side. How much is going to add an extra 110 bucks or whatever? Like yeah, it's a lot right for your peelable solder mask. But if you're gonna what peelable solder mask once again, you probably don't need this video to tell me for me to tell you what it is.

And do you want the UL marking on your board? It doesn't add anything. No, it's just do you want the stamp too because you might have some regulatory requirement You need that marking on your board. If you didn't already add it to your silkscreen, you should be. If you need these sorts of things, don't rely on a checkout process in a PCB checkout shopping card to add it.

No, add it yourself to the silkscreen. You've got it. You know you're gonna take control of your boards. So yeah, I'm surprised they even have that.

There's an option, really, because our proper PCB designer would already know to add that, not just tack it on at the checkout shopping cart. Checkout: Give me a break. When I was a boy. Do you want half cut or castellated holes? I've done these before, does it? Yep, it goes up from five to twenty six bucks.

Easiest just to show you some photos. Yeah, but like if you're doing a module board, it basically means that you have cut off right. You do these as pads. It's easy to design, you just put pads down, but then you specify your board.

outline is going right through the center of all those pads and then they come along with their routing bit or their chopping bit and they just won't chop your pad in half and you can let be left with little dagi bits in there. And you know stuff like that. I mean this is really yeah, that's a that's a nice example. You know if you're designing a modular board and you say can turn your little PCB module into a surface mountable module because you can get your soldering iron in there and you can put pads on the board below it and then solder it in.

So yeah, that's that's a particularly clean example there. But you can be left with little DAGs and burrs and everything else on there. so just be careful, you know. But yeah, generally when you'll be paying, you know, Five bucks for your boards.

A twenty six bucks for five boards. They're not gonna take care of how many birds and eggs you've got hanging off there. Now we've got Halogen-free here. Do you want to use a halogen free process? It adds quite a significant cost there.

Once again, this will be depend upon regulatory or company requirements. For example it is. Basically they will just use halogen free processes so there's no none of those gases trapped within your board. So when you solder them, the the halogens not release which can be a toxic or when you dispose of the boards it's not released and all that sort of stuff it's at once again it's an environmental requirement and if you need it, you made it via in ped filled with a resin.

Do you want very impaired? Well let's go to the videotape. once again. Back to our BGA example. Really densely populated.

you may not have this once quite a wide spacing so we can't afford to put the video out here and then run a trace over there and and do that. but some. For some really densely populated stuff, you may not have the advantage to do that because you might want to route some traces out on the top or you might wear all the pin pitches too small. all sorts of various reasons.

So what you can do is place Via Sorry I've only got a large one we can do. We can do that. We can modify it anyway. let me change this.

So let's change the size of that. Let's say we want a 10 mil diameter Via and this is a naught point one millimeter hole. I Typically do my holes in Metric and we can put Via in pad like this: go to a 3d view here I'm not sure why it's showing up like that. that's kind of.

is that a bug or something? Anyway, I am using an old version, but anyway, you can see that we've got Elvia inside the pad like this. and there's disadvantages to this because when you put your solder paste on there, when you reflow it, the solar place gets weekd. When you reflow it, it gets weak down the hole and that can suck away and you might not get enough solder paste for your ball for example. So that's why they have the option to via in pad via filled with resin.

They will automatically fill it with resin because basically what this option is saying is that they don't care whether or not you have vias in pads. That's absolutely no concern to the to the PCB bare board manufacturer. It's a concern to your assembler, but you can put vias in your pads to your heart's content. They don't care.

But if you tick this option, what that means is that you're going to actually plug that hole so that the solder paste is not wycked down that hole when you actually reflow solder so that that's what you're paying for. Otherwise you i'm ticket, you can put your vias there if you happened over you solder wick down your hole. No worries, go for it. Still only cost you five bucks.

Now Z-axis million here as the name, the comments not popping up don't know why. what that means is you should know Z-axis is the depth of the drill in this direction. So what this means is that the drill doesn't go all the way through and route out. It'll go only partially way through your board and then route out like a little will inside your piece of beer.

I Couldn't actually find any. my Google foods are failing me. Couldn't find any decent photos of this. and I don't have one to hand physically.

this one's actually this is not an example of control depth PCB Drilling You can actually do this one. If you've got a multi-layer board, you can specify I Want this bit here routed out on the top couple of layers and then the bottom layers actually fill it in and then when they manufacture it, they'll manufacture it as I said as two separate layers like this and then they'll glue them together. If this top one has this bit rounded out and the bottom one doesn't then you end up with this cavity. It's so an open cavity.

PCB You can do that usually without having to take this Z axis milling because you're not actually doing a controlled depth milling. In that case, you're just doing regular routing on your layers. But whether or not you know a prototype company might come back to you and say hey, look when like we're not going to do this on the specific layers or you might have to do, you know they might negotiate a special price for you to do that or something. So this is different.

It means that they do it. Once your PCB is finished, then they'll You know it could be an eight layer board or whatever. two layer board doesn't matter, they will Control Depth didn't drill it and you might have that for some requirement where you might want to sit components flat or flatter inside the board like you like. You might have a through-hole component that you lay sideways and of course are the pins are in the middle, but you may want to lay it a little bit into the board so you reduce your height profile of the board and there's this various other and there's various other reasons for doing Z-axis million but that's what it is.

the process where they control depth mil out a little well inside your PCB for whatever reason you want, they don't care and edge plate in. How much does that increase? I'm not a huge amount, only only 21 bucks for edge plating, edge plating. Tada. that's edge plate in when they will plate the edges your board in whatever surface finish they happen to be using.

in this case, it looks like emotion gold finishing. You get gold plated