Areas that shouldn't be soldered may be lined with solder resist . The solder mask is what provides PCBs their attribute inexperienced colour, though it's also out there in a number of different colors, corresponding to pink, blue, purple, yellow, black and white. Dry movie solder mask is similar to the dry film used to picture the PWB for plating or etching.

After being laminated to the PWB surface it is imaged and developed as LPI. Once but no longer commonly used, due to its low accuracy and resolution, is to screen print epoxy ink. In addition to repelling solder, solder resist additionally offers safety from the setting to the copper that may otherwise be exposed. The easiest method, used for small-scale manufacturing and sometimes by hobbyists, is immersion etching, in which the board is submerged in etching solution similar to ferric chloride.

There is not any need for a fixture and therefore the mounted prices are much lower. The CAM system instructs the electrical tester to apply a voltage to every contact level as required and to examine that this voltage seems on the appropriate contact points and solely on these.

Or, even when all components can be found in through-hole packages, it might be desired to reap the benefits of the scale, weight, and cost reductions obtainable through the use of some available floor-mount devices. Boards with no elements put in are normally naked-board examined for 'shorts' and 'opens'. A brief is a connection between two points that shouldn't be related. An open is a lacking connection between points that ought to be related.

For high-volume manufacturing, a fixture or a rigid needle adapter makes contact with copper lands on the board. The fixture or adapter is a significant fixed price and this technique is simply economical for top-quantity or excessive-value manufacturing. For small or medium quantity manufacturing flying probe testers are used the place test probes are moved over the board by an XY drive to make contact with the copper lands.

In-circuit test methods may be used to program nonvolatile memory parts on the board. While the power is off, visual inspection, automated optical inspection. JEDEC pointers for PCB element placement, soldering, and inspection are generally used to take care of quality control in this stage of PCB manufacturing.