Electronics manufacturing glossary

Short, honest explanations of the terms that come up every day in quoting, manufacturing preparation and costing an assembled PCB. Written by the people who model those processes.

NRE costs

NRE costs (non-recurring engineering) are the one-off costs incurred before the first good assembly leaves the line: the stencil, programming and setting up the placement machines, feeder setup, first-article inspection, test fixtures and process documentation. They arise per order or per manufacturing revision, not per piece.

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Selective soldering

Selective soldering is a soldering process for through-hole (THT) components in which a small solder nozzle travels to exactly the joints that are to be soldered. Wave soldering, by contrast, runs the entire underside of the board over a solder wave. Selective soldering therefore allows through-hole components to be soldered on assemblies that are already SMD-populated and would not survive a wave.

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Gerber file

A Gerber file describes a single layer of a printed circuit board as a two-dimensional drawing: tracks, pads, solder mask or silkscreen. A complete fabrication data set consists of several Gerber files, one per layer, plus drill and routing data. The current state of the format is Gerber X2/X3, which additionally carries attributes such as layer function, material data and pad types.

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ODB++

ODB++ is a manufacturing data format for printed circuit boards and assemblies. Unlike Gerber, it does not describe individual layers as drawings but the assembly as one connected data model: layer stack, netlist, components, pads, drills and routing paths in a structure from which relationships can be read rather than reconstructed.

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PCB assembly

PCB assembly is the placing and soldering of electronic components onto a bare printed circuit board. The result is called an assembly or PCBA (printed circuit board assembly), the bare board on its own is not one yet. There are two placement technologies: SMD, where components sit on pads on the surface, and THT, where component leads are pushed through drilled holes. Most assemblies are mixed.

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Bill of materials (BOM)

A bill of materials is the list of every part a product is built from. BOM is the usual abbreviation for it. In electronics it is the file that price, procurement and manufacturing of an assembly are all derived from.

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Electronics manufacturing

Electronics manufacturing is the production of assembled printed circuit boards and the devices built from them. A bare board, the components and the manufacturing data set become a tested, working assembly. At its core is placement in SMD and THT technology. Before that comes work preparation with material planning and setup planning; after it come soldering, testing and, depending on the product, final assembly, programming and functional test.

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EMS provider

EMS stands for Electronics Manufacturing Services. An EMS provider builds electronic assemblies on behalf of other companies: it sources the components, places and solders the boards, tests the assemblies and ships them. The product and its design belong to the client, the manufacturing sits with the provider. The market ranges from a shop with a single line to a group running several plants.

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