wisepowder: Isola 370hr-Understanding PCB Materials and Specifications

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Although Isola had published the announcement quoted below, alluding to the termination of manufacturing FR, they now seem to be backpedaling a bit and state that it is still available. Perhaps someone let the cat out of the bag a bit early??? Reports from PCB manufacturers continue to pour in stating in simple terms that FR is either extremely limited or completely unavailable.To get more news about Isola 370HR PCB, you can visit pcbmake official website.

Those alternative products are readily available and typically as a lower cost. And from the land of brass-balls, some Isola staff are threatening legal action for making the public aware of this situation.

Makes one wonder about the viability of their entire organization. As a result Isola is discontinuing regular production of their FR laminate family; this material will still be available for an undetermined time, but at increased cost, increase material lead-time and with minimum order requirements. We are offering Isola HR as the primary replacement for FR to be used on new and existing designs.

English French Italian Portuguese Spanish. CTE Z-axis.A global material sciences company focused on designing, developing, manufacturing and marketing copper-clad laminates and dielectric prepregs used to fabricate advanced multilayer printed circuit boards.

Isola high-performance materials are used in a diverse range of electronic end-markets including applications in computers, networking and communications equipment, high-end consumer electronics, as well as products designed for use in the advanced automotive, aerospace, military and medical markets. The company invests in research and development to create industry-leading products formulated to meet the most demanding performance requirements of its customers, the printed circuit board fabricators, and the designers and original equipment manufacturers OEMs they serve.

The global footprint includes ten manufacturing facilities and three research centers located in Asia, Europe and the United States.

Isola A global material sciences company focused on designing, developing, manufacturing and marketing copper-clad laminates and dielectric prepregs used to fabricate advanced multilayer printed circuit boards.When you give a PCB for fabrication, you need to specify details on PCB materials, impedance controls, finish, copper thickness and so on. Most of the details are so common that they are always assumed.

However still it is better to know them. Below is a screenshot of quotation submitted by a fabricator for a PCB design of size 9. The layers may be either routing layer or plane layer. The commonly used no. The PCB materials used for 3 or 4 layers would almost be same. Routing layers contains tracks while plane layer are generally used to connect power or ground. Plane layers have plane of copper from which connections are drawn up or down wherever needed.

Islands can be formed on plane layers and each island may have different signal. Suppose some sets of chips on one board use 3. It is a commonly used PCB material. The reasons for its ubiquity as a PCB material are its high dielectric strength, high mechanical strength, light weight, resistance to moisture and other properties conducive for PCB manufacturing. Go for higher thickness if you have heavy components on board to get better strength. Keep an eye on thickness even when you have high voltages on board.

Another popular way to express is in grams or Oz. Ounces per square foot of copper per unit area. X Oz would mean that X Ounces were spread on the Board material and it was distributed uniformly over an area of 1 square foot. Go for higher copper thickness if the current density on board is greater than in average digital circuits. In normal boards 35 microns is good.

Up till a current of 1A and copper thickness of 1 Oz, track width of 10 mils is safe. If unchecked, such tracks may cause significant power loss. For maximum power to be transferred to other end of track, length and geometry of the track should be carefully laid taking care of transmission line equations. As a rule of thumb, if the board is of FR4 PCB material with copper tracks and signal rise time is 1 nanosecond then 2 inches is a safe distance.

If the track length exceeds this and signal integrity is important then consider the transmission line effects also. There are lot of free programs and excel sheet available on net that calculate impedances for prevalent geometries. If impedance control has been mentioned to the fabricator then an extra test is done on the completed PCB to check the required impedances.