Concepts and terminology

Printed Circuit Boards (PCB)

used

in

Basic PCB Concepts

What is a printed circuit board?
A printed circuit board or PCB, is a plate or board used for placing the different
elements that conform an electrical circuit that contains the electrical interconnections
between them.
The most simple printed circuit boards are the ones that contains copper tracks or
interconnects only on one of its surfaces. These kinds of boards are known as 1 layer
printed circuit board or 1 layer PCB.
The most common PCB's manufactured today are the ones that contain 2 layers, that is,
you can find interconnects in both surfaces of the board. However, depending on the
physical complexity of the design ( PCB layout ), the boards can be manufactured of 8
or more layers.

Fig 1. Example region of a 2 layer PCB

Soldermask
For mounting the electrical components on the printed circuit boards, an assembly
process is required. This process can be done by hand or through specialized
machinery. The assembly process requires the use of solder to place the components
on the board. For avoiding or to prevent the solder to accidentally short-circuit two
tracks from different nets, pcb manufacturers apply a finish or varnish called soldermask
on both surfaces of the board. The most common color of soldermask used in printed
circuit boards is green, followed by red and blue.
In EDA software (Electronic design automation), generally exist a rule associated to the
expansion of the soldermask. This rule specifies the distance that exists between the
pads' borders and the soldermask's border. This concept is illustrated in figure 2 (a).

Silkscreen or Overlay
Silk-screening is the process where the manufacturer prints information on the
soldermask conducive to facilitate the processes of assembly, verification and repair.
Generally the silkscreen is printed for indicating test points as well the position,
orientation and reference of the electronic components that are part of the circuit. Also it
can be used for any purpose that the designer may require, for example, the company
name, configuration instructions (this was commonly used in old PC motherboards), etc.
The silkscreen can be printed on both surfaces of the board. Also the term silkscreen is
known as overlay. Figure 2 shows a region of a circuit, all the printings made in white
correspond to the silkscreen.

Fig 2. Soldermask expansion (a) and silkscreen (b)

Layer Stackup
As noted before in the beginning of this article, the printed circuit boards can be made of
several layers. When a PCB is designed with the aid of an EDA software, often are
specified several layers that doesn't necessary correspond to conductive material (
copper ). For example, the silkscreen and soldermask are nonconductive layers. Having
conductive and nonconductive layers may lead to confusion, because manufacturers
use the term layer when they are referring to the conductive layers only. From now on,
we are going to use the term layer without the suffix "CAD" only when referring to
conductive layers. If we use the term "CAD Layer" we are referring to all kinds of layer,
that is, conductive and nonconductive.

The CAD Layer stackup is the following:

CAD
Layer
(conductive and CAD Layer description
nonconductive)
1
2
3
4
5
6
...
n-1
n
n+1
n+2
n+3

Top silkscreen/overlay ( nonconductive )

Top soldermask ( nonconductive )
Top paste mask ( nonconductive )
Layer 1 ( conductive )
Sustrate ( nonconductive )
Layer 2 ( conductive )
...
Sustrate ( nonconductive )
Layer n ( conductive )
Bottom paste mask ( nonconductive )
Bottom solder mask ( nonconductive )
Bottom silkscreen/overlay ( nonconductive
)

Figure 3 shows 3 different stackups. The orange color highlights the layers in each
stackup. The stackup height, or board thickness can vary depending on the application,
however the most used is 1.6 [mm] or 62 [mils]. In some countries [thou] is used as a
synonym for [mils]. ( 1 [mil] = 0.001 [inch] = 0.0254 [mm] )

Fig 3. Example of 3 different PCB stackups: 2 layers (a), 4 layers (b) and 6 layers
(c)

Component packages
Today in the market you can find a great variety of electronic component packages. It is
common to find several types of packages for one device. For example you can find the
same integrated circuit in QFP's and LCC's packages.

Basically there exist 3 big families of electronic packages:

Package

Description

Example
Image

Are all those components that have pins intended

to be mounted through a plated hole in the PCB.
This kind of component is soldered to the opposite
Thru-Hole
side of the board from which the component was
inserted. Generally these components are mounted
on one surface of the board only.
Are all those components that are soldered in the
same side of the board from which the component
was placed. The advantage of this type of package
SMD/SMT (surface
is that it can be mounted on both sides of the PCB.
mount
Also, these components are smaller than the thrudevice/surface
hole type, which allows the design of smaller and
mount technology)
denser printed circuit boards. These types of
components are useful for frequencies up to 200
[MHz] (fundamental clock frequency).
These types of components are frequently used for
high density pin integrated circuits. For soldering
them to the printed circuit boards it is required to
have specialized machinery due that the pins are
made of solder balls that have to be melted for
making the electrical contact with the pads.
BGA
(Ball
grid
array)
BGA components are ideal for high frequency
integrated circuits due to the very small parasitic
inductances present in the joint between the pad
and the balls. These type of components are very
common in computer hardware like motherboards
and video accelerator cards.
For more information you can visit this excellent article from wikipedia.
Surface Mount Technology - Wikipedia

Pads
A pad is a small surface of copper in a printed circuit board that allows soldering the
component to the board. You can think of a pad as a piece of copper where the pins of
the component are mechanically supported and soldered. There are 2 types of pads;
thru-hole and smd (surface mount).

Thru-hole pads are intended for introducing the pins of the components, so they can be
soldered from the opposite side from which the component was inserted. These types of
pads are very similar to a thru-hole via.
The smd pads are intended for surface mount devices, or in other words, for soldering
the component on the same surface where it was placed.
Figure 4 depicts 4 components. The components IC1 and R1 have 8 and 2 SMD pads
respectively, while both components Q1 and PW have 3 thru-hole pads.

Fig 4. SMD and Thru-hole Pads

Copper tracks
A track is conductive path that is used to connect 2 points in the PCB. For example, for
connecting 2 pads or for connecting a pad and a via, or between vias. The tracks can
have different widths depending on the currents that flow through them.
It is important to highlight that in high frequencies is necessary to calculate the tracks'
width so that the interconnect can be impedance matched along the path created by the
track. ( more on this in a future article )

Fig 5. Tracks that interconnect 2 integrated circuits (chips)

Plated Holes (Thru-hole Vias or Full Stack Vias)

When an interconnect must be made from a component that is located on the top layer
of the printed circuit board with another that is located at the bottom layer, a via (Vertical

Interconnect Access) is used. A via is a plated hole that allows the current to pass
through the board. Figure 6 depicts 2 tracks that begin at the pads of a component on
the top layer and end at the pads of another component at the bottom layer. For
conducting the current from the top layer to the bottom layer, a via is used for each
track. The tracks and pads that belong to the bottom layer are visually dimmed, so you
can differentiate them from the ones that are on the top layer.

Fig 6. Two integrated circuits located on opposite sides of the PCB are connected
using thru-hole vias
Figure 7 depicts a more detailed view of a transversal section of a 4 layer printed circuit
board or 4 layer PCB. The colors that appear in the Figure are explained in the following
table:
Color
green
red
violet
yellow
blue

Legend for Figure 7

Top and bottom soldermasks
Top layer ( conductive )
Second layer. In this case this layer is used as a power plane ( i.e. Vcc or
Gnd )
Third layer. In this case this layer is used as a power plane ( i.e. Vcc or
Gnd )
Bottom Layer ( conductive )

The PCB depicted in figure 7 shows a track that belongs to the top layer that goes
through the board using a thru-hole via, and then continues as a track that belongs to
the bottom layer.

Fig 7. Track from the top layer going through the PCB and ending on the bottom
layer

Blind vias
In high density complex designs is necessary to use more than 2 layer as we have
shown in figure 7. Generally in multilayer system designs where there are many
integrated circuits, power planes ( Vcc or gnd) are used to avoid excessive routing for
power rails. In other words, it is lot easier and more secure to directly connect to the
power planes that are beneath the chips instead of routing long tracks for the PDS (
Power Delivery System ) ( this can also be achieved with thru-hole vias ). Also there are
times that a signal track must be routed from an external layer ( top or bottom ) to an
internal layer with minimum via height because it can act as a stub and maybe produce
an impedance mismatch. This can cause reflections and produce signal integrity issues
( more on this in a future article ). For these kinds of interconnects blind vias are used,
which allows a connection to be made from an external layer to an internal layer with
minimum via height. A blind via starts on an external layer and ends on an internal
layer, that's why it has the prefix "blind".
To know if a certain via is blind, you can put the PCB against a source of light and see if
you can see the light coming from the source through the via. If you can see the light,
then the via is thru-hole, otherwise the via is blind.
It is very useful to use these kinds of vias in printed circuit board design when you don't
have too much space for placing components and routing. You can put components on
both sides and maximize the space. If the vias were thru-hole instead of blind, there
would be some extra space used by the vias on both sides.
Figure 8 depicts 3 vias that are part of 4 layer printed circuit board. If we see the picture
from left to right, the first via that we will see is thru-hole via or fullstack via. The second
via begins at the top layer and ends at the second layer ( inner ), so we say that this is a
1-2 blind via. At last, the third via begins at the bottom layer and ends at the third layer,
so we say that this is a 3-4 blind via.

It is important to have in mind that blind vias are often manufactured in consecutive
layers, in other words between L1 L2, L3 L4, Ln-1 Ln.

Fig 8. Comparison between a Thru-hole and a Blind via

The disadvantage of this type of via is its high price when compared to the thru-hole
alternative.

Buried Vias
These vias are similar to the blind ones, with the difference that they begin and end on
an inner layer. If we look at the image depicted in figure 9 from left to right, we see that
the first one is a thru-hole or full stack via. The second one is a 1-2 blind via, and the
last one is a 2-3 buried via that begins on the second layer and ends on the third layer.

Fig 9. Comparison between Thru-hole vias, Blind vias and Buried vias
It is important to have in mind that blind vias are often manufactured in consecutive
layers (i.e. L1 L2)

As the case of blind vias, the main disadvantage of this type of via is its high price when
compared to the thru-hole alternative. Using b/bb vias may impact the cost of the
boards in an important way, so you decide if it's better to use these kinds of vias or use
bigger boards with thru-hole type vias.
Eng. M. Patricio Cohen
Electrosoft Engineering
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