Epec's Blog | Electronics Manufacturing Solutions

Stop and think of the role colors play in our daily lives for a moment. Colors can influence everything from what you wear to the car you buy. Colors can trigger emotions, memories, even hunger. Certainly, colors and patterns matter to companies advertising and selling products. Communicating with customers in the manufacturing world about selecting an exact color, however, has proven challenging enough as to require a particular system, known as the Pantone Matching System.

Among the multiple layers of a printed circuit board (PCB) lies the PCB silkscreen layer. The placement of the silkscreen markings, whether on the top or bottom layer, in conjunction with the features of the other layers, could affect the final legibility of the printed circuit board markings.

When creating your SMART user interface design, the operating environment should be taken into careful consideration. Environmental contaminants, moisture, temperature extremes, UV radiation, and overall wear and tear from use in outdoor environments are factors that should be considered before determining material and component selection for your SMART user interface.

If you are shipping products from China, underestimating the importance of understanding supplier logistics can come at great peril. Anyone that's been to mainland China has seen some things that probably made you double take in disbelief. You get off the plane, sitting in the back seat of your supplier’s van, most likely jet lagged, and you look out the window to see a bicycle comically overloaded with packages. Once you realize what you're looking at, the first thing you’re probably thinking is I’m really glad my stuff doesn’t get shipped that way. But can you really be sure?

Before designing your custom human-machine interface (HMI) project, it's important to have an idea of all the steps involved before and during production. Each step has variable length so while there isn't an exact timeframe for production, having a more informed viewpoint is critical to everyone's ability for following HMI design best practices.

Flex circuit suppliers come in a variety of different sizes and stages of financial integrity. Choosing the one that will perform the best for your requirements is an important element to the success of you application. Knowing what questions to ask your flex circuit supplier is essential in choosing who will be manufacturing your flex circuits.

For every flexible circuit board manufacturer, there are some key areas you should be aware of. While flex circuits have some similar characteristics to rigid printed circuit boards, they require very different approaches in the manufacturing process.

All companies judge themselves on simple things like revenue, expenses, and income. Most manufacturing companies measure even more metrics like capacity utilization, yield, inventory turns, and on-time delivery. All of which are very important to ensure that business is profitable.

In the world of flexible circuit boards, stiffeners are a common requirement in a lot of flex designs. By definition, a circuit board stiffener provides a mechanical support function and is not part of the electrical schematic of a design.

Today, there are well over 3,000 companies that manufacturer printed circuit boards (PCB) in Asia (China, Taiwan, Japan, India, Korea, Thailand) with the supply capacity continuing to grow well ahead of the global demand.