![]() For example, applying silk screen on only one side and choosing the standard colors will give you better overall pricing and give you the same benefits. Knowing more about PCB and silk-screening can help you to reduce your PCB costs. Try to keep the line widths no less than 6 mil. Also you should check to see if the width of the silkscreen graphics is suitable to the design. While designing you should keep the component outlines away from the pins (almost at a distance of 0.25 mm). This is why it should be applied over the solder mask. For example, the silkscreen epoxy should not be printed over pads or land PCBs that will be soldered as it will melt into the solder joint. There are a few things you should keep in mind regarding silk-screening. The silkscreen can easily label the passive components of the PCB no matter how packed the board may be. It should be noted though that the acrylic ink does not cure on boards with silver finishes.Ī properly designed silk-screen can prove to be highly useful as it can reduce the chance of error and can reduce time taken to spot the error. The ink is cured with UV light as it is printed. At this stage, your design will be printed onto the PCB. In fact, the silkscreen process has 32 different steps, which can be put into 6 processing areas: 1 PCB silkscreen design. ![]() However, it is one of the most sophisticated processes. In this process an inkjet projector is used with acrylic ink that is applied onto the raw PCB directly from the CAD data. The silkscreen process is known as one of the sub-process of printed circuit board manufacturing. It is much more accurate than manual screening.ĭLP is the most accurate of all these processes but is more expensive. After this the board is developed and cured. In this a liquid photoimageable epoxy is coated on to the laminate and then exposed with UV light. Liquid Photo Imaging is quite similar to the process used for the application of solder mask. This method is used when the line widths are greater than 4 mil. The application and set up is easy but the result is least precise. Next the board is baked in a curing oven for the ink to cure. The ink is pushed through the stencil onto the laminate. For this method you require a stencil of the text and traces made of nylon. Manual screen-printing is done when the line widths are greater than 7 mil (0.007”) and the registration tolerance is 5 mil. There are three basic ways to apply silkscreen. For traditional silk-screening you require a polyester screen stretched on aluminum frames, a laser photo plotter, spray developer and curing ovens. PCB software also uses standard fonts in silkscreen layers but you can choose other fonts from the system too. The standard colors we normally see are black, white and yellow. The ink used for these markings is highly formulated. Essentially a detailed PCB silkscreen can help both the manufacturer and the engineer to locate and identify all the components. This silkscreen is usually applied on the component side however using silkscreen on the solder side is also not uncommon. Silkscreen is a layer of ink traces used to identify components, test points, parts of the PCB, warning symbols, logos and marks etc. Tuesday,Nov 08,2016 What is silk-screening?
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