Fabrication

Fabrication turns your Gerbers into bare boards. The core process is subtractive: start with fiberglass sheet clad entirely in copper, print your traces as a protective pattern, and chemically etch away all the copper you didn’t claim. What survives is exactly the artwork from your files.

Around that core step, multilayer boards get laminated. Inner layers are etched first, then stacked with insulating prepreg and pressed under heat into one sandwich. Holes are drilled and then plated with copper so vias actually conduct between layers. Solder mask goes on and gets cured, silkscreen is printed, and the exposed pads receive a surface finish, such as HASL or the flatter ENIG, to keep them solderable.

Boards are then routed out of the production panel, electrically tested against your netlist, and shipped. The economics are worth knowing: setup costs dominate small runs, so five boards often cost about the same as one. Order spares. Prototype services turn designs around in days, which makes PCB fab one of the most accessible manufacturing processes anywhere.