Component Selection for Easier Design and Manufacture of Electronics

Reading time ( words)

“Simplify, simplify, simplify.”

                      —Henry David Thoreau 

Thoreau penned his simple lifestyle mantra more than 150 years ago and it still as valid today as it was when he first captured and recorded his thoughts on paper. He was not the first to extoll the importance of simplicity, but he said it in a memorable way.

Achieving simplicity has been deemed a worthy objective by many philosophers over centuries, and people often profess to seek simplicity in their lives. In the world of high tech, simplicity is arguably one of the foundational objectives of most of the technologies that surround us today. Certainly this is true in terms of how product designers are trying to create interfaces that allow even the most nontechnical users to get what they need from electronic products with a minimum of hassle.

However, that interface simplicity is undergirded by a massively complex electromechanical substructure of circuits, sensors and components. Pop open any high-end electronic device and you will be met by an impressive mass of densely packed components and circuits. Presently, those components are available in a wide array of formats, with a number of different lead shapes and forms along with the device’s mechanical outline. Presently, there are J-leads, I-leads, gull-wing leads, posts, balls and no leads at all. Mechanical outlines are generally square and rectangular, but the bodies can have a wide range of dimensions in X, Y and Z. While area array technology has helped to make things smaller, it has also upped the complexity factor from a design perspective by mixing grids and land shapes and sizes.

Why so many options? It is because there is not, nor has there ever been, a truly coherent approach to the process of selecting package structures for ICs or any other components for that matter. Yes, a roadmap for electronic component lead pitch was introduced with the advent of SMT, and that roadmap said that every next-generation lead pitch should be 80% of the size of the previous generation lead pitch.

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Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the November 2014 issue of The PCB Design Magazine.

02/18/2019 | John Watson, CID, Legrand Inc.

From where we stand now, at the beginning of 2019, we see lead times for some components in the short range of up to 16 weeks; medium-to-high is 32 weeks, and long lead times are as far out as 80 weeks. In other words, if we ordered a component today, it would arrive in over a year a half from now (maybe). This all started with the capacitors (we will see why later), but we now see other component series being sucked into this problem.

04/14/2015 | Martin Cotton, Ventec International Corp.

The right decisions are not always the easiest decisions, but making them well and as early as possible often avoids errors and addition costs. This is certainly the case in PCB design and a key decision influencing the design process and the eventual outcome is the selection of material and of the materials vendor. This is even more important when the PCB requires significant performance parameters to be met, such as high speeds.