Updated 19-02-2021

“Personalised PCBs?

Why would I want to personalize the appearance of my PCB design?” Well, your boards may be visible in the final product and you want to add customer appeal or brand awareness. Or as a prototype designer you want your customers and prospects to recognize your work and send you new projects.

There are already different ways used to personalize PCBs: adding a logo in the legend; using a different soldermask colour or designing a recognizable board shape.

Now we offer something more – PCB PIXture.

The PCB PIXture mask.

We developed software to break a graphical image into pixels and convert the image to DPF. This is the format used by our frontend engineering system (UCAM) and our laser phototool plotters. With this software we can now add any graphical image into a PCB dataset and create an extra ‘Image layer’ that can be printed, for instance, as a soldermask layer.

How do we make a PCB PIXture mask?

The PCB PIXture is printed on the boards as a double soldermask layer. The first layer is a white photo imageable soldermask made in the normal way. The second layer, printed over the first, is a black soldermask layer with the artwork based on the PIXture file. This process does not affect the functionality of the board or the solderability, as the material we use is standard photo imageable soldermask ink.

PCB PIXture

Since 2014 a normal pool able technical option in the solder mask section of the PCB configurator.