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I'm really surprised that most of this isn't automated completely.

I am surprised at how much manual labor goes in to this. I thought the reason you could get PCB production so cheap these days was that it had become highly automated.

That was really interesting. It was good of them to shoot the video for you and they actually did a decent job of it.

You should send your board files to cheaper "hobbyist" type PCB fabs like pcbway, dirtypcbs and elecrow to compare the results. That would be neat.

Damn that's a lot of work....

Developer! Developer! Developer! Developer!

Card edge connectors are hard gold which is a galvanic process. You pay a premium for combining the normal chem. NiAu for SMD and the galvanic Hard Gold for the card edge connector. This is important as you should not solder on Hard Gold, as Gold easily alloys with tin, forming a bridle joint.

The reason they electroplated the copper the second time was to increase the copper up to the required thickness. The copperclad they use only has a thin layer of copper on it. That allows them to etch them faster and have finer traces.

Cool vid Dave. Would love if you could do one called 'EEVBOG #1000 How Is An IC Manufactured?'

21:07 Story of my life, paying per hole :/

how is pcbb formed

This process seems to be tiny compared to what I do every day at work. We make multi layer panels and start off with inner layer cores that are etched, punched, scanned (I am an AOI scanner), lay up, press, flash, then drill. And the electroless lines at my work are massive, the panels are carried by a massive crane from tank to tank. Theses panels are also very small, the panels we process can be as big as 36x34 inches down to 18x24 inches. You didn't get to show the full process sadly, but it's nice to see a process shown online.

They are very inexpensive to produce. This was one of the better videos that I've seen showing the entire process.

You had this footage for 4 years?

Hey Marty, is stripper solution a type of solution that makes it's living on a pole?

Another one of these 'it is so cheap, only $5 ' videos. Maybe $5 each for a 1000 qty order or $5 each min order 20. Or $5 each and $20 postage. A little less exuberance and real world prices would be a good idea.

I must have said to myself "Ok, now were done" like 8 times!

For my electronics project I got two quotes, one from pcbzone.net and one from JLCPCB. One was 50x more expensive than the other.

Great video Dave - especially given that it is your PCB in the videos.

This is fascinating! Why anyone would down-vote resists explanation. The only part that I didn't follow was the thru-hole plating. How does the metal build up in the thru-holes?

I really enjoyed this video. Quite interesting what processes are used and in what order they are done. Thanks for sharing it with us!

Really interesting to see this entire process - also it's ridiculous how much manual work still goes into this!

Handling the boards and chemicals without gloves. Must be a high quality manufacturing facility...

Very informative video Dave, thanks!

looks like PCBZone is folded. closed..

You use the electroplating after film development to be more efficient in the use of the copper. The base board has only a thin copper layer of 1µm or less. On the exposed parts the copper is electroplated to the desired thickness. Afterwards you only have to etch away the thin base plating which is faster and consumes less copper in total. You could even skip the tin-plating step here: eletroplating to a thickness of 18µm and then etching away 1µm of copper over the whole board will consume all copper between the traces, but the thickness of the traces would only be reduced by 1µm to the standard 17µm. No risk of underetching here as well - yet another advantage of this method.

How can you go round this place and decide not to upload the footage straight away or within a few weeks at least? Makes me wonder what else is stored on that computer. Very interesting though. So thankyou

Hey Dave, nice video! do you happen to know what kind of ink they use for the soldermask and silkscreen? I've been searching for those like crazy, thanks man!

How does the electrolysis bath plate the holes? Aren't the holes just naked glass fiber and resin?

excellent video. thank you Dave !!

Wonderful video to watch, very informative!

Of the hundreds of your videos that I have watched Dave, that was the bees knees mate! Thankyou for all the time and effort you put into your superb videos :) Much love from the UK!

Interesting video in a long time :)

This is brilliant. Thanks so mutch!

For vias, would they drill out the hole and then plate it? Or is it more like a rivet that gets punched in?

they did the second CNCing before the v-grooving!!

10:42 I have heard from some manufacturers that they have a rather thin base layer of copper, and by electrolysis they deposit the amount of copper required for the desired thickness. That way when there is the etching step, there is only the thin layer of copper to be etched away. I was really hoping to see more on how the through hole plating works, its still not totally clear for me and my home brew process is quite lacking....

Wow, the CNC electrical continuity tester is one I never thought of. Amazing. All of the processes are amazing. Something to work towards. Excellent video.

really informative David

Thanks for making this video. I have been looking for something like this for a couple of years, but have always only found how are PCBs being populated with components.

2012? Jesus, Dave :D What determines the current during the electrolysis process Dave? Is it the resistance of the solution itself?

That's a lot of dirty manual labour.. I'm really surprised. But you do mention that techniques have been replaced at this particular plant

Valaki jött ElTech laborról ?

Excellet video. Thanks

If you are in Auckland you should ask if you can get a tour. Richard has given our company a few tours of the workshop. Its cooler to see in person, and you get to ask all the questions! He's a nice guy, very helpful.

Was hoping to see the FR4 being made. :(

Wow!!!! great vid!!! Thanks!!!

Wow, pcb manufacture is an incredible process. So time consuming and repetitive and complex. Very good to see, thanks Dave.

Thanks for adding the design and hard edge video links Dave, was confused until I refreshed :)

Awesome! Full of data and demo!

was waiting a long time for such a video again(Back to the basics) well done , love it

This is a very interesting process. It'll be great if you could make a video showing the complete updated process for comparison.

one of my favorites!

Very interesting! Thanks, Dave!

Considering the price I'm amazed at how much work goes into making a board, especially how much of the work is manually loading the boards. For the price you pay I'd have expected a lot more automation.

Thanks Dave! Very interesting! :)

That was very interesting and fun to watch!

Yup. These PCB manufacturers offer services that are relatively cheap! I use EasyEDA. Pretty good PCB manufacturer and service delivery times. Think how you would have build your own prototype board years ago. Hmm, bloody wires everywhere... "Now, what wire is controlling my power delivery PWM circuit again????" Bloody FPGA....FAIL!

Personally i use Osh Park... minimum of 3 boards and there based in USA. i cant find anyone els that does it cheap. well Bottech in china do but only if you have 50 or more boards made

This was a great video. Thanks Dave!

Please where can I buy a red mask user in the video ؟

I'm surprised there's so much manual work in the process. I would have though it was mostly automated by now. Also, I'm surprised they don't wear gloves and chemical respirators since they're exposed all day long.

can't use positive fotoresist, no way how to cover THP holes ;) so you must cover holes somehow, so this is only way, tin cover everything, including THPH

I think they pattern-plate (tin-plate) the design before etching so the etchant doesn't get into your vias and cause problems. I'm not sure how you'd be able to protect the vias with etch-resist otherwise.

I would like to see how multi layer PCBs are made, and also in the contex of mas manufacturing of 1000s of units

As a Texan, I'm surprisingly amused by your Australian euphemisms. The "How you doin'" and "Bobs' your uncle" completely elude me as to their origin, but I'm determined to find out! I just figured out who this "Bobby Dezzla (Dazzler)" fella is..... Great video as always. This is very informative. I watched a video on how to do PCBs at home, but sending it off seems the proper way to get it done. Still, it's a fun home project once or twice.

Good video. Loved it. Roller/HAL tinning is still done by many, though, it seems.

How electrolytic plating can create copper layer inside FR4 holes/vias which are not conductive?

OSHPark rocks! I used to etch my own PCBs since I was 10 (ah, the ferric chloride stains in the bathroom sink. My Mom just "loved" me for it...), but now, there's no point in making a mess.

Thx, Dave. Thumbs up! Simple, not overloaded video about bad to health work. Don't you whant to make a video about 4-layer board tracing basics? For example, with 2 external signal layers and 2 internal power layers.

Hopefully, we'll be 3d printing them some day.

Theres lots of people doing through hole with soldermask and liquid tin at home. As long as you have a decent cnc machine or laser printer your good to go. Its great for prototyping and then when you got finished it send it off.

Gpanos XP asked: "What is the point of non-plated holes ? Assuming there is at least one hole to be plated, why not plate all of them?" Some reasons: Plated through holes vary slightly in finished diameter because the plating thickness is not 100% exact -- differences in current distribution (usually resulting from certain holes being isolated because there is little or no circuitry in the area) are the main cause. Another factor in final hole diameter variation is the use of hot air leveled solder for the surface finish. HASL can puddle or blob slightly as it cools. Even small variations can cause noticeable differences in diameter, which makes insertion of tight-tolerance tooling pins or other hardware a headache. (The plated through component holes are intentionally sized slightly larger than the corresponding component lead sizes, and a further tolerance is applied, so that this variation does not cause assembly problems if the holes are slightly undersized.) So NPTHs are always preferred for tooling holes (which will hold the assembled PCBA in the final enclosure) although one hole may be plated for chassis grounding in some cases. Other NPTH uses: Screw holes for connectors and similar components, insertion holes for plastic stand-offs or component orientation tabs, and the small "mouse bite" perforation holes used to facilitate breaking the individual PCBs out of multi-PCB assembly panels. Picture this: If mouse bites end up unintentionally plated because of a production error, dozens to hundreds of tiny rings of metal will either break free or need to be picked out of the holes manually when the PCBs are broken out of the panel -- and this is on a fully populated board, where any one of them left behind could cause a catastrophic short. It's actually best to drill the NPTHs with the plated holes, then protect the NPTHs with film "tents" so they do not plate through. This offers superior dimensional accuracy between the NPTHs and the PTHs, as well as between all holes and the circuit pattern. The secondary drill setup at the end can throw off dimensional relationships slightly. The panels need to be set up again (often on a different machine) and the material has been subjected to mechanical and thermal shock, etc. during earlier processes. So unless your NPTH holes are supported by copper pads, or are embedded in metal plane areas with no relief, always plan to drill most of your holes in the initial ("primary") drill step if accuracy matters.

It's sad that I can't get cheap PCBs for prototypes in my country. Three 10x10cm boards will cost you at least 100USD.

I wonder if they even do this in America still. This is a labor intensive and is virtually unchanged since I was working in a PCB factory in 1990. The way we did this stuff, when the electroplating was happening, you mostly just sat there and waited for the thing to finish. Sometimes, when we were busy, we would load the trees, but that was only if we had the spare trees and the very first tank, which was a weak acid/water mix, was free. We spent a good portion of the day just waiting for the electroplating to finish. It's usually about an hour. You move the trees from the copper to the tin-lead, give the ones in the tin lead to the next guy, move the ones from the cleaning bath to the copper bath and load the water/acid bath and all this only takes about 15 minutes, so you really just sit around or clean or other make-work for 30-45 minutes (the specs determine how long the main copper bath lasts, usually about 1 hour). Moving those trees around was hard work and you had to wear these large rubber aprons and there was no air-conditioning. It hurt your back and you sweat your ass off. The environmental people would show up all hours of the day and night for spot checks. The floor was a "board walk" All the wiring for the DC current used for the machines were under the board walk and it also kept the floor dry from constantly moving the trees from one bath to the next. The liquids would pour off the boards when took the trees out to move them to the next process and there would have been puddles of acids on the floor without that "board walk" design..

1. Glunz & Jensen don't make imagesetters, they produce developing machines for films (and offset printing plates). 2. It actually IS a silkscreen process they use, but instead of using it to print the final pattern onto the board (be it soldermask or text) they chose to use it only to apply a uniform, overall film of the photosensitive compounds. Silkscreen gives uniform and controlled coverage. They probably found out, that imaging & developing boards themselves is far less hassle than imaging and developing the silkscreen so that it prints selectively. Also, accurate positioning the board under the silkscreen is much harder than positioning a translucent film on a board. For huge production runs it is feasible to prepare the silkscreens with the actual layouts of top & bottom soldermasks as well as the text layers, and make custom jigs for accurate positioning of the particular board.

At 10:52 they are most likely plating up the copper thickness to the require copper weight.

You are clearly rushing yourself. Relax! Slow down!

Great vid

i remember from my school days (circa early mid 2'000s) - marker on single bit of plastic with metallic coating and some sort of acid, just paint the pathways and throw it into acid. however multi layered is something i had no clue how to do (except possible 2 layered - one on each side). Edit 3 addendum: ah so its as simple as just using the magic of glue :/ somehow i thought its really clever solution that somehow gets between the layers but nope.

Sounds like a arc light. I wouldn’t be surprised if that machine in the video has one. I know welding like spot welding where you are tacking something in place you don’t use a mask close your eyes. I always wear sunscreen when doing that because if you don’t the arc from the welder will give you sunburn. I just looked into them. IMAX projectors use them.

But that IS silkscreening for the componen overlay and the soldermask. Apply "colour" through a mesh with a squeegee and then dry it off.

Best 'how it's made' ever.

Hey, probably somebody already explained it why they did the negative process. But I guess, they had to cover the copper with tin so that the vias coatings don't get lost during the etching process. So if a board wouldn't have plated vias, they wouldn't use this process (probably)

Watched whole process wondering why the machines are so slow for China and so much manual labour was involved, then @24:32 Dave revealed it was the old factory in New Zealand. Woo New Zealand! Now I know why the NZ boards cost so much..

Wow! What a great video!

A lot of people saying that small runs like this can't be automated... that's ridiculous. You could automate this from top to bottom, just get rid of every human interaction one by one. Human is required to flip a board over in the machine? Make a machine that can do both sides at once, or can flip the board within itself. Human is required to know where to send the board after machine A, be it Machine B or Machine C? Easy, that's what roller belts are for. These are all solved problems. The problem is, there's no money in small runs of boards, so no one will ever invest the money into making the automation better. On most runs, of thousands or millions of boards, automation wouldn't help much, as the entire line of machines is configured once and then humans just send tons of boards through.

...meanwhile, in this universe, I still haven't seen any PCB fab offer for the one or two pieces of PCB real people actually need that can be used in the same sentence as "cheap". Having to wait a few weeks for fab+ship is just bonus.

Try and speak without all of the ah; ah; ah; it gets very irritating. I had to turn off the sound because it was driving me crazy. Otherwise I enjoyed it, Many thanks.

10:40 This is the actual plating that builds up the traces and the ground plate. If you didn't do this step, your traces would only be as thick as the copper coating on the fiberglass board. To keep costs of the boards down, the copper coating is extremely thin. Where I worked, this particular process took like 45 minutes. That is a copper-sulfate bath with a copper source in it. Where I worked they used these long thin "baskets" filled with copper nuggets.

i thought electroplating would only work on metal but a freshly drilled hole should show fr4. did i miss something?

2010!

What is the point of non-plated holes ? Assuming there is at least one hole to be plated, why not plate all of them ? From what I see, the process would be the same. BTW, great video Dave! Manufacturing and how-it's-made vids are awesome.

We actually do the film process in my Schools clean room.... mainly cause most of this equipment is insanely expensive and places have donated all the equipment. Its still very cool way of learning the manufacturing process and working in a clean room

What do they do differently for small production runs (like prototype boards)? The router seems like the slower part of the process, how do they deal with boards that have a few billion vias? Are small vias processed any differently than your larger plated through-hole?

This might be a really dumb question, but I really want to know, which major between chemistry or chemical engineering does creating such a machine would need? (other than electrical control and mechanical of course)

The gold being flat is because it isn't electroplated but put on "electroless nickel", which doesn't rely on an electric potential difference to reduce the metallic ions and encourage them to form metal where you want it. Instead it happens spontaneously when you put it in a solution. The reason that it's hard to get flat electroplate is because there is a non linear process at play where when metal is deposited at one spot it will make a bump, causing a higher electrical field there (Volts/Meter), and much like say a sharp point on metal object carrying a large voltage will cause discharge, the copper will be more likely to plate out there increasing the size of the spot until it becomes a large spiky mess. Electroplate solutions often have large molecular mass cations (positively charged ions) such as quaternary ammonium surfactants, often this is very proprietary stuff, in them to compete with the copper so this is less of a problem, but it's still hard to get a uniform plate out of the copper without small imperfections.

One of the reasons the panel is bigger is for the tree to connect to the panel while maintaining electrical continuity. If they weren't bigger, the trees would NOT conduct electricity through the photoresist mask during the electroplating portion of manufacturing your board.

The inside of the board is fiberglass filled epoxy, right? How does electroplating work on that? I thought it only plates onto conductors.

And it only costs lie 1 dollar for each small board. Considering how many procceses PCB manufacturing has 1 dollar is a steal.