PCB News - The higher the number of PCB layers, the better the performance

The higher the number of PCB layers, the better the performance

The circuit board can be regarded as a miniature carrier platform and an important carrier for integrated circuits. The emergence of PCB multi-layer boards allows more and more complex circuits to be accommodated in a limited space as much as possible. In addition, it also simplifies the layout of the circuit on the PCB to a certain extent. Many friends think: The more PCB layers, the better the performance. Is this true?

At present, the most common PCB multilayer board on the market is a four- or six-layer board. The higher the precision of the product, the higher the requirements for the number of layers of the circuit board. It is not surprising that the number of PCB layers is as high as several hundred layers in aerospace equipment.

The more layers of the circuit board, the higher the wiring difficulty index, so the production cost is relatively high. However, this does not mean that the performance of high-level PCBs is higher than that of low-level PCBs. High-level PCBs are only used to allow electronic circuits to obtain more wiring space and ensure that the subtle wiring can also have an optimal layout. The higher the number of PCB layers, the lower the electromagnetic interference between the layers, which reduces the interference between signals and prolongs the service life of the PCB.

The performance of the circuit board cannot be equated with the number of layers. Simple four- or six-layer PCB multi-layer boards also have excellent performance. In fact, the number of layers of the circuit board is only a rigid requirement for the design of the circuit board, not as a criterion for judging the quality of the PCB.

Since the circuit board is mainly composed of raw materials such as corrugated fiber cloth, resin and copper foil, the material itself has a certain thickness. The higher the number of layers of the PCB multi-layer board, the more layers of these materials are stacked. Therefore, the To a certain extent, PCB multi-layer boards have stronger rigidity than single- and double-layer boards.
PCB multilayer circuit board

Due to the different technical capabilities of various circuit board manufacturers, the total number of components that can be reasonably accommodated on each layer is also different. Theoretically speaking, within a reasonable range, there is no difference between the performance of mounting 100 components on one layer of circuit board and distributing them on two layers of PCB circuit board. It's just that the current demand for the volume of electronic products is getting smaller and smaller, which requires that the design space becomes smaller and the volume of the circuit board becomes smaller and smaller under the same performance.

Therefore, to sum up, the higher the number of layers of the PCB multilayer does not mean the better the performance, and the design should be combined with its own use requirements.