Epec's Blog | Electronics Manufacturing Solutions

In the world of electronics, oftentimes how a signal is being transmitted from a sender to a receiver is just as important as what is being transmitted in the first place. Certain applications call for incredibly high levels of reliability and resistance to outside electrical interference, so more "traditional" or "common" cables just won't do.

It's never a great sign of the times when you wake up every day and know you need to check the news before starting work to see what the newest challenges are you're going to have to deal with. Unfortunately, this trend became standard practice within our industry in 2018. Typically, most companies spend their time and money trying to find new ways to speed up service or new products to help their customers. But for most of this past year, it was about working closely with your customers on their existing business to minimize damage from all the new costs that were quickly being added to our industry.

As a designer and manufacturer of custom battery packs for high reliability applications, our customers are continually demanding that we make packs that are smaller, have more power, run longer, and all at a competitive cost as they try to make their devices more portable.

The average American “holiday season” usually begins somewhere around Halloween and continues at a frantic pace through January 1^st.  For those of us who work in supply chain management, the holiday season has a completely different meaning. 

ENEPIG (Electroless Nickel, Immersion Palladium, Immersion Gold) was derived out of the need to combat the challenge with the immersion gold process and Black Pad Syndrome. Black Pad (the hyper corrosion of underlying nickel) was baffling both PCB assemblers and manufacturers. After much analysis, the root cause was determined to be the nickel deposit.

Discrete wire, or lead wire, is the backbone of any interconnect or cable. Within this blog post we break down for you the anatomy of the basic hookup wire and the compositions that can be used as a single unit or grouped together to produce a multi-conductor or multi-pair cable.

Heat shrink tubing, also known as heat shrink, is a shrinkable tube that shrinks radially when exposed to heat. Produced using a two-step process, heat shrink is available in a wide range of materials to suit almost any application. Heat shrink tubing has many useful applications, including to provide electrical insulation to wires, connections, joints, terminals, and splices, as well as bundling loose items such as wires and as a protective covering.

As costs of materials, freight, and labor rise it has become imperative to seek out alternative ways to save costs in the manufacturing process. With traditional means of saving no longer as viable, we now must be more creative and specific when we’re asked, “what can I do to lower the cost of my printed circuit board (PCB)?”

Printed circuit board (PCB) designers often find themselves at odds with their purchasing and marketing departments after a design goes out for bids and comes back with a larger than expected price tag. Once the source of the high cost is identified, the questions fly, the fingers point, and the nerves fray.

While gold plating is frequently used for printed circuits boards (PCBs), selecting the most useful gold PCB surface finish can be somewhat more of a mystery. Understanding the different compositions and practical uses of gold finishes such as ENIG, ENEPIG, and gold fingers can help you find the right finish to match your circuit board needs.