What Are the Types of PCBs?

The development of printed circuit board has a history of more than 100 years. Its design mainly adopts layout design. The main advantage of using circuit boards is to greatly reduce wiring and assembly errors, and improves the level of automation and production labor rate. Usually printed circuit boards have various types such as single-sided PCBs, double-sided PCBs, multilayer PCBs and Flex printed circuit boards etc. according to requirements of different fields. The application fields include medical, defense and automotive and so on. So, you need to consider some factors such as stress handling, space required, mechanical and electrical stability when you select. Here we will share with you the types of PCBs.

Single-sided panel

It is the most basic printed circuit boards. The parts are concentrated on one side, and the wires are concentrated on the other side. Because the wires only appear on one side, this kind of PCB is called a single-sided circuit board. The single-sided board has many strict restrictions on the design of the circuit, because there is only one side and the wiring cannot cross and must be around a separate path. So, only early circuits use this type of board.

Double-sided panel

This kind of circuit board has wiring on both sides. Since it uses wires on both sides, there must be a proper circuit connection between the two sides. The "bridge" between such circuits is called a via.  A via is a small hole filled or coated with metal on the PCB, which can be connected to the wires on both sides. Because the area of the double-sided board is twice as large as that of the single-sided board, the double-sided board solves the difficulty of interlacing wiring in the single-sided board. It can be connected to the other side through via holes, and it is more suitable for use in circuits that are more complicated than the single-sided board.

Multilayer board

In order to increase the area that can be wired, multi-layer boards use more single or double-sided wiring boards. Use one double-sided as inner layer, two single-sided as outer layer or two double-sided as inner layer and two single-sided as outer layer printed circuit boards alternately together, and conductive pattern through positioning system and insulating bonding material on printed circuit boards are interconnected to become four-layer and six-layer printed circuit boards according to design requirements, which is also known as multilayer printed circuit board.

The number of layers of the board does not mean that there are several independent wiring layers. In special cases, empty layers are added to control the thickness of the board. Usually, the number of layers is even and includes the two outermost layers. Most motherboards have a 4 to 8 layer structure, but technically, it can be a PCB of nearly 100 layers. Most large supercomputers use fairly multi-layered motherboards, but because these types of computers can already be replaced by clusters of many ordinary computers, super-multilayered boards have gradually ceased to use. Since the layers in the PCB are tightly integrated, it is generally not easy to see the actual number. If you observe the motherboard carefully, you still can see it.