Dumb question here - I see that the 6 layer boards were discontinued. What happened? I liked this option. Will this option come back in time? Or will it remain permanently gone gone gone.
We decided to focus on offering an improved 2&4 portfolio, with many great improvements coming soon. Our 6 Layer offering may be updated and reintroduced at a later date, but I cannot tell when or if this will happen.
Our Goal is to provide the best service possible, and sometimes it is better to stop offering a product than to hang on.
As long as there is no 6-layer service, you should weed out all remainder for 6-layer PCBs on your web pages.
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Can you please list where we still reference them? I hid/marked all references I could think of as discontinued.
Here some hits:
- https://aisler.net/ Beautiful Boards: 2 bis 6 Lagen
- https://aisler.net/products/boards: Erhältlich für zwei, vier und sechs Schichten, Preis pro gewählter Technologie (zwei, vier oder sechs Lagen)
- 6-Layer HD PCB Stackup
Probably ripgrepping in your web source tree will find more.
Hello,
I am very disappointed by this announcement because I spent quite some effort to design RF electronics for this stack up.
Discontinuing the stack up after just two years is a no go for me. Two years is a typical development duration for more advanced projects. This happened overnight without any preannouncement (At least I did not notice it).
I am (and also others I know personally are) in the middle of a development. The stackup was verified to support analog RF signals up to 20GHz. We must now find another prototyping PCB house.
My confidence in AISLER is shattered.
Regards,
Tobias
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Hi Tobias,
I can understand your frustration regarding the discontinuation of our 6 Layer offering, there have been various reasons for it, including demand and availability.
Would it be viable to use the 4 Layer Stackup instead? We would be open to supporting you and others who have worked on a 6L project by providing store credit for 4 Layer boards.
Thanks for your quick reply. I probably will make some test board(s) with the 4 layer stackup.
Regarding @tobias
I more or less have the same concerns. E…g. there are some manufacturers which offer online quotation for PTFE or rogers PCB’s, but as soon as you fill in some parameters they want to see the design before giving a price.
Chicken and egg problem. I do not want to design an RF PCB for a specific stackup, run simulations and than find out that the price is way above budget when ordering ( considering sometimes some iterations might be required as well)
Designing an RF PCB (especially when it contains microstrip filters, antenna’s … takes some effort) .
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You are welcome to message me when you have a 4L Board ready.
Hello,
Would it be viable to use the 4 Layer Stackup instead?
Unfortunenately the Aisler 4 layer stackup is not suited well for this task. In a first approximation it´s about substrate height. The subsrate height of the 2xPrepreg layers is only 140um. This will relate to narrow line width for 50R impedance. For digital circuits this is in many cases desireable to improve line density and also the interfaces to the narrow pads of digital ICs.
For analog RF we want (in most cases) a wider trace width. This brings the losses and the influence of manufacuring tolerances down. If one wants do design filters in many cases line impedances well above 50R are required somewhere in the filter. A wider trace width (~650um) allows the designer to reduce it. If we start with a 250um trace width there is no margin for narrowing the traces even further (150um trace width manufacturing limit).
We need therefore a higher substrate heigt. In the previous 6 Layer stackup this could be acheived easlily by choosing L03 as the refernce for analog RF linie. This effectivly adds the 200um core thickness to the 2xPrepreg thickness and one ends up with a convient line width of about 650um. Even better: For digital circuits one can change the RF reference plane to L02. In this way the best of both worlds was implemented in the stackup. This is why I liked it very much. This “trick” is not possible with the Aisler 4Layer stackup due to the very thick core (1130um)
A 4 Layer stackup can of course also work well for RF. One looses the flexibility to change the refrence planes but this may be acceptable. However the stackup requries for analog RF then
- Thicker Prepregs in the order of 370um between L01 and L02
- Or a much thinner core (wich will decrease the total board widh by huge agmount… most likely not possible)…
Eurocircuits offers a suitable 4 layer stackup. However, pepole designing for high speed digitial circuits may not like it.
We indeed had more digital applications in mind with our 4 Layer Stackup, in fact, some users would like even thinner prepreg. I never worked with RF systems, so I was unsure how suitable smaller trace width are for RF applications.
So…me also im very disappointed about discontinue the 6 layer stackup, some works must be re design coz are RF and due the high densitiy of the components a 4 layer stackup it not enough, hours of work…throw away and i dont want immagine the last design.
For now i dont fully trust in Aisler.
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The 6 layer offering was nice, but I understand that if its not making Aisler money… Then it has to go. I respect that.
Projects which require 6 layers will be more complicated - and require therefore more time to develop. I think two years may not belong enough for people to recognize the stack up and design for it. Nevertheless, I assume that there are more people out there designing simpler two or four layer PCBs.
It’s a shame. I really liked Aisler. It was an opportunity to buy in Germany and support a Europe company instead of a Chinese one.
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That is true, it takes time for things to catch on - especially for something more complicated.
Bummer. Maybe it wasn’t possible for whatever reason, but it would’ve been nice to have provided a warning that this change was coming. I would have preferred higher costs and longer lead times to an abrupt discontinuation.
FWIW, the price I’m quoted from a competitor for similar 6L boards is nearly 100% more than what I was paying Aisler.
I’d probably still use your 6L service even if the price was twice as much and the lead time was twice as long.
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I would like to voice my support for a 6 layer option to come back in the future.
My designs are progressively getting more and more complex over time, requiring more layers to complete. 6 layer was perfect for my most recent project and I really like the boards that Aisler produce.
It feels like a real shame to have to send my business back to China again.
I would like also to support for the return of the 6-layer stack in the future. Very disappointing!