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Electronic Engineering

PCB Fabrication and Assembly

From Materials Science to Additive Manufacturing

  • 81 pages
  • 2026
  • pt

Most designers hand over the file and never see the board again until it comes back assembled. This book is about what happens in between — and it is written by someone who was there: before he was a designer, the author was an industrial maintenance technician on the machines of a printed circuit fabrication and assembly line.

Twelve chapters on the board’s journey after the software: the science of materials and substrates, the DfM and DfA rules that decide whether the board can be built at all, inner-layer processing, lamination, drilling and plating, solder mask and surface finish, paste deposition and SMT, the soldering processes, inspection and quality control, IPC standards and certification, project and supply-chain management and, at the end, additive manufacturing and 3D-printed electronics.

It is the book that explains why a design that passes DRC can still come back from the factory wrong — and what to change in the design so that it does not. Whoever designs gains the vocabulary to talk to the factory; whoever works in the factory gains the reason behind every step.

In this book

  1. 01 Materials science and substrates
  2. 02 Design for Manufacturing (DfM) and Design for Assembly (DfA)
  3. 03 Inner-layer processing and lamination
  4. 04 Drilling and plating
  5. 05 Solder mask and surface finish
  6. 06 Solder paste deposition and SMT
  7. 07 Soldering processes
  8. 08 Inspection and quality control
  9. 09 IPC standards and certification
  10. 10 Project and supply-chain management
  11. 11 Emerging technologies
  12. 12 Additive manufacturing and 3D-printed electronics

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