How Do PCBs Work?

Techquickie ·Techquickie ·2017-05-06 · 917 words · ~4 min read
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0:00 so you just bought a shiny new motherboard and after you're done ooing
0:04 and eyeing over the heat sinks that say extreme gamer that are designed to look
0:10 like a battle axe or whatever you might have noticed all those tiny traces on
0:17 the board that connect all of your ports headers and sockets together and
0:21 actually make the board light up and function correctly and although they're
0:26 not particularly exciting traces on
0:30 printed circuit boards or pcbs have basically made all of modern Electronics
0:36 possible in fact before they became widespread in the latter half of the
0:40 20th century connecting every electrical
0:43 component inside of an appliance looked a little something like this a huge mess
0:50 of individual wires this is actually a
0:53 look inside of a TV from 1948 I mean
0:56 imagine trying to build a computer or even bu a flat panel TV if you had to
1:02 deal with that fortunately the idea of
1:06 embedding wires in a flat piece of fiberglass really took off as the years
1:11 went by making it possible to fit a PC in a backpack instead of a giant cabinet
1:17 but how exactly then do they pack so many important Connections in such a
1:22 small space the process is actually
1:26 somewhat similar to how CP user manufactured which you can learn more
1:30 about in this video albeit at a bit of a less complicated scale slices of
1:36 fiberglass are stacked together and treated with a resin that makes them
1:41 stick to each other to make one solid slab then layers of copper are applied
1:46 to both sides and Co it in a chemical called photo resist after this a pattern
1:54 that matches up exactly to the traces that are supposed to go on the board is
1:59 placed on top top then the whole thing is exposed to UV light the board is then
2:04 washed which well washes away the
2:08 uncovered areas leaving tracks of copper
2:12 these tracks serve as a base for how the PCB will ultimately look after a couple
2:17 of more steps including etching additional copper and more washing but
2:22 keep in mind that this process is often done in layers which is why it's a
2:26 terrible idea to try and drill through your motherboard if you're having
2:30 trouble mounting a cooler to it the internet has more than a few Tales of
2:34 people that tried to do this only to find out that their board didn't work at
2:38 all afterwards because they drilled in the middle of traces that were visible
2:43 from the outside but went right through
2:46 ones that were inside of it but that
2:50 isn't to say that boards don't get drilled at all during manufacturing at
2:54 the factory boards not only get mounting holes drilled through them for whatever
2:59 four form factor they happen to fit in but they also get small holes to
3:03 accommodate connections for small electrical components like chips
3:07 capacitors and resistors as well as Tiny
3:10 interconnects between the different layers of copper traces so after things
3:16 like PCI Express slots heat sinks and CPU sockets are mounted or soldered to
3:22 the board it's basically finished but since a PCB is just a collection of
3:27 electrical connections on some kind of of a substrate you don't actually need
3:32 any fancy manufacturing processes to make a simple one in fact you can even
3:36 buy markers that will dispense electrically conductive ink onto special
3:41 paper so you can literally draw your own working PCB pretty cool but given the
3:47 inherent complexity in manufacturing something like an ATX motherboard I
3:51 wouldn't count on being able to make your own one of those and maybe stick to
3:55 you know making LED art that you can stick to your refrigerator
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