At 04:29 PM 11/24/02 +0000, you wrote:
>Fine as long as you can afford it.
>Look inside almost any consumer product and you will see the lengths
>they go to to avoid using a double sided PCB - loads of wire-links,
>ink-printed tracks etc. I'd agree that SS PCBs are nowhere near as
>rugged, especially with heavy components, but for a huge number of
>applications they are fine, IF carefully designed.

Horses for courses. If it meets the requirements and is cheaper,
including any stuff you may have to do to make it meet the
requirements (eg. eyelets on some holes), then it's better. A HUGE
number of single-sided boards are made every day. Same with the
laminate- cheap paper phenolic, FR-4, polyimide or Gtek, etc.
Sometimes it's cheaper (or the only way) to go with multilayer,
and swallow the costs. That said, we are doing more 4-layer
designs than single-layer in our market space these days (but the
single-layer designs will have more units built).

High volume designs can use things like injection moldings to
support inexpensive boards and their components mechanically that
would be impractical in a low-quantity product.

Best regards,

Spehro Pefhany --"it's the network..."            "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

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