Designing a circuit board involves many factors that could all help to prevent long-term reliability failure.
When I consider discuss conformal coating and the issue of design, then I am really talking about two areas of design. These are design for reliability and design for processing.
- Design for reliability of the product
- Design for conformal coating processing
Defining both design criteria could be critical to the reliability of the product and the circuit board.
Get the conformal coating design for reliability wrong and the product may fail in the long term before the expected lifetime is reached.
Fail to design for the conformal coating process correctly and the product may not even reach the field due to excessive costs.
Both of the design criteria are assessed by Nexus. Both should be considered together to give the best results for the product.
Designing for conformal coating reliability
Understanding the design requirements of the printed circuit board to be protected by the conformal coating is one of the most fundamental questions that can be asked.
After all, the purpose of the conformal coating is to extend and preserve the life of the product.
When designing for reliability then there are several important areas to consider for the product.
These include:
- Reliability Requirements
- Life Cycle
- Environment
- Materials and Parts selection
- Electrical Effects
Considering each area separately can be crucial for the reliability of the product.
Click to find out more about conformal coating design for reliability of the product
Design for conformal coating process
Once the product reliability requirements have been defined as part of the conformal coating design procedure then the resulting information needs to be combined with the data from the holistic approach.
The holistic approach examines many factors that when combined with the product reliability requirements give us exact information for designing for process.
The conformal coating process defined
Combining reliability requirements and holistic information gives us the following information:
- Conformal coating material to be used
- Application method that is suitable for the material and circuit board
- Masking requirements if necessary
- Production line stages required
- Process parameters to be met
- Inspection criteria to be used
This data is then combined into a set of conformal coating instructions that can be used to implement the conformal coating process.
Click to find out more about designing for conformal coating process.
Need to find out more?
If further information on these topics and the key question you can go to our free eBook by clicking conformal coating design now.
If you are new to Nexus and our work on conformal coatings then a good place to go is our Start Here page.
Dr Lee Hitchens is the author of the Nexus conformal coating website and eBook.
Send me an email at lhitchens@nexus3c.com and let me know what you think?
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