PCB Technical - Detection and solution of common problems of PCB circuit board

Making printed circuit boards is not as simple as drilling and piercing holes in the board to complete the circuit,the process of producing PCBs itself is not complicated, but the challenge often lies in the troubleshooting and debugging that takes place after production is complete.Whether you are a hobbyist or an engineer in industry, the debugging phase of a PCB can be quite tricky, just as much of a headache as a programmer who encounters a bug in his programming.

Some people take a keen interest in debugging printed circuit boards, enjoying the process as much as programmers are keen to solve bugs in their code. While the common problems with printed circuit boards are not numerous, some typical challenges do exist, including board design defects, damaged electronic components, short-circuit problems, and poor component connections. In addition, PCB quality issues as well as board breakage failures occur from time to time, and these are areas to focus on during the debugging process.

Common PCB failures tend to focus on individual components on it, such as capacitors, resistors, inductors, diodes, transistors, field effect tubes and so on. When there is obvious damage to integrated chips and crystal oscillators, observation by the naked eye is an intuitive and quick method of judgement. If there are obvious burn marks or physical damage on the surface of the electronic components, then this type of failure is relatively straightforward to resolve, usually by simply replacing the faulty component with a new one.

Of course,not all electronic component damage can be observed with the naked eye, such as the resistors, capacitors, diodes, etc. mentioned above. In some cases, the damage cannot be seen from the surface, and it needs to be repaired with the help of professional inspection tools. Commonly used inspections include: multimeters, capacitance meters, etc., when the voltage or current of a certain electronic component is detected to be out of the normal range, it indicates that there is a problem with the component or the previous component, directly replace it and check to see if it is normal.

If the components are bad, either by eye observation or instrument detection, can be detected, but sometimes we give the PCB board components detection, we will encounter the detection of the problem, but the board can not work properly. Many newcomers to this kind of circuit board problems and solutions, can only helplessly re-produce a circuit board or buy a circuit board. In fact, in this case, many times due to the fit of the individual components in the installation process, which may lead to unstable performance of the components.

In this case, the instrument can no longer help. You can try to judge the possible range of the fault according to the current and voltage, and try to reduce it as much as possible. An experienced engineer may be able to quickly determine the fault area, but which of the specific components is broken But it is not 100% sure. The only way is to try to replace the suspicious component until the problem component is found. Last year, my laptop motherboard was flooded, and when I was repairing it to the master, I also encountered that it could not detect the fault, and during the repair process, I replaced three components, namely the power supply chip, diode, and USB charging component (that is, the blue notebook). The socket can be used to charge the device when it is turned off). In the end, the suspicious chip was replaced through a wave of detection and investigation, and it was finally determined that a component on the side of the South Bridge chip was short-circuited.

The above is actually the printed circuit board problems and solutions for electronic components. Of course, since the printed circuit board is the basis of the components, the circuit board failure is bound to exist.