PCB manufacturing

The Company doesn't manufacture their own PCBs. This is because several factors such as time, cost, manpower, etc. This is what is believed being done by the most of electronic related industries because it is way much better than doing it themselves.

PCB manufacturing requires the equipment necessary to produce an industrial standard PCB. Home made PCB would not be good enough and may not have marketable presentation as they are not well prepared according to the IPC standard. Besides that, each PCB design may require different equipment in order to produce. It is not viable if the company to purchase specific equipment just to produce the one off specific design. Therefore, outsourcing would be really good measure to fully optimize the cost of prototyping or mass producing the PCB.

The process of manufacturing a PCB here in Korea would take only 1 day to complete. The designer will send a Gerber format file to the manufacturer and then the next day, they will send the PCB complete with all the required specification. This might be a different scenario back in Malaysia because not that many PCB manufacturers are available. Therefore the time to produce and cost will be very much different. Some of the so called manufacturer do not even do that themselves, but outsource the job to the company in China instead. This will take more than a week to complete.

Masking is very important in a PCB design. Some people might not know how much important it is until they want to mass produce the product. This is very common to a fresh university graduates as this knowledge did not being taught to them. Masking will help to ease the soldering process and help to produce a very clean and tidy PCB soldering task. The mask will separate the pads from the rest of other pads and pins. Besides that, only the masked PCB is able to be soldered using the PCB dipping machine. The use of dipping machine will produce an industry standard PCB.

Through hole plating and vias are are another important aspects of a PCB design. These two techniques will enable the use of vias and better through hole manual soldering. Remember that the IPC standard will require the volcano shape fillet. The through hole plating will help to stream away the excess solder at the certain pin and creates a well shaped volcano fillet on each through hole pin.