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In order to assure your silkscreen’s readability, make sure that it is located safely away from all other board elements that might impact its readability, especially solder mask clearances. There are technologies that allow the printing of finer lines, but they are more expensive and might not be available where your board is being fabricated. For example, a Liquid Photo Imaging (LPI) process is usually limited to a four mil line width. Last but not least: different silkscreen processes and machinery impose a variety of limitations on minimal line width and character dimensions. All these factors should be kept in mind when locating silkscreen elements on the board. The red color denotes copper features.īut even if the silkscreen is kept safely distant from solder mask clearances, its readability may be affected by other factors, such as proximity to the board’s edge, proximity to tooling or mounting holes, or location under components. On the right, the silkscreen is clipped to keep it away from the solder mask. In the above example, the silkscreen (blue) is close to solder mask clearances (green) on the left. Naturally, clipped silkscreens become less readable, and in extreme cases – not readable at all.įigure 1: Silkscreen before and after clipping The required distance between silkscreen elements and solder mask clearances depends on the silkscreen process and its accuracy – which might differ from manufacturer to manufacturer. So, in order to ensure the board’s quality, the standard procedure in most fabrication pre-production processes is to clip the silkscreen to keep a minimum required distance from solder mask clearances, as seen in Figure 1. Since silkscreen ink is not conductive, it can damage the quality of electrical contacts when it mistakenly protrudes into a solder mask clearance, possibly resulting in the scrapping of assembled boards if the flaw is not identified during electrical tests. The first aspect is of the utmost importance for the fabricator.
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What can go wrong with silkscreen?ĭuring the data preparation for the PCB fabrication process, the CAM engineer treats silkscreen layers with the following goals in mind : The silkscreen is applied to the bare board during the final fabrication stages, and is mainly used as a guide for board assembly, testing, and later – maintenance and repair. The silkscreen is applied using non-conductive ink, whose standard color is white, but other colors are available as well. It does not store any personal data.A silkscreen contains human- and machine-readable marks on the surface of a PCB that indicates PCB components’ positions and polarity, test points, warning and standardization symbols, logos and other information about the board. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance". This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
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