From now on AISLER is your partner when it comes to fast and convenient manufacturing of PCB designs that include Castellated Holes. Nowadays the most common way to transform your PCB to a surface mounted sub-assembly component. Use AISLER to increase the versatility of your modules significantly and improve your design for manufacturing automatically.
The best of all: Unlike all the others, we do not charge for it!
Castellated Holes for newbies
Castellated Holes are a series of Plated Through Holes or Vias placed on the edges of the PCB which allow you to transform your PCB into a surface mounted sub-assembly component. When cutting the board at the end of the manufacturing process, only a half of each plated hole remains in the PCB. These Plated Half Holes now serve as pads to solder the sub-assembly to the surface of the motherboard.
In most cases, Castellated Holes are designed as regular (fully) Plated Through Holes located with their center on the edges of the PCB. Thus, the copper inside and around the holes overlaps, respectively borders to the outline of the board. Without any further processing of this state, the milling tool now needs to cut through the bounding layers of copper when following the board outline. But cutting through copper is always a difficult process and - even with adjusted milling parameters – copper-leftovers and/or burrs cannot be fully avoided during manufacturing. Especially when it comes to Castellated Holes, these undesired copper leftovers can affect the functionality of your PCB and make additional refinishing work necessary.
Why is this a valuable upgrade?
A common way to avoid copper-leftovers is to modify the PCB data by trimming the surrounding copper for every single hole by hand to ensure that no copper needs to be cut by the milling tool. This is not only terribly time-consuming and thus expensive for the customer, but also prone to errors.
Well, not if you order your PCBs with AISLER!
We detect Castellated Holes in your PCB design and get this annoying work done for you. We realize this by slightly trimming the copper layer – just enough to prevent the formation of undesired leftovers while not affecting the functionality of your design. Curious for more? Have a brief look on our design guidelines, upload your PCB design and directly see the result in our Board Inspector!
Cheers
