What are Mouse Bites in PCB?

What are Mouse Bites in PCB?

Mice often don’t grow to be very big. They leave a few distinct imprints as a trail of evidence whenever they chew on anything. The PCB you own may contain “mouse bites” or evidence of previous damage. Don’t be so scared anymore. The presence of other rodents is not indicated by these mouse bites.

 

Instead, these tiny holes make lifting a circuit board off the assembly line’s workstation easier. At this time, the coord inates of these divots have been meticulously measured and plotted. They’re not dissimilar to the mouse’s crumbs you may find after it’s gone.

 

No real mice are involved in our explanation of how “mouse bites” may be discovered on printed circuit boards, so there’s no need to get the cheese out or set up the traps. Instead, we’ll zero down on a mouse that nibbles PCB and its dimensions so you can be confident you’ll have a firm grasp of the ins and outs of mouse bites in PCB fabrication.

In terms of printed circuit boards, what are “Mouse Bites” exactly?

 

Manufacturing panel components known as mouse bites in PCB are essential to the function of printed circuit boards. In the circuit board manufacturing and assembly process, they are helpful. Many people use the term “mouse bite” to describe the action of over-etching copper. However, our meaning here is different.

 

Computer-aided manufacturing, or CAM for short, is used by manufacturers of printed circuit boards to organize individual circuit boards into a panel. For the smaller boards, in particular, this panel ensures that the assembler and fabricator have enough board material for handling throughout all stages of production.

 

Because panels tend to be uniform in size, it’s easy to fit many copies of your PCB layout inside its borders. Not only would making circuit boards from scratch be easier with the panel. Also, by doing so, panels of boards may be processed at once for the same price as one board individually.

 

To utilize these mouse bites in PCB, you must remove them from their panels after manufacturing and assembly. The process of dismantling them into individual panels is known as depanelization. Removing individual boards from the panel and breaking them apart along “V-grooves” are viable options for depanelization.

 

The boards you need to free yourself from must have a notch or slit cut around their perimeters. This will help provide some distance between them and the panel, which is held in place by just a few tiny tabs of material. This process involves severing the “breakout tabs” that hold the board to the production panel.

 

As a bonus, these tabs are equipped with small holes that make it easy to break the PCB and reduce the boards’ stress levels. Once you cut away the excess, the remaining fabric will have a “mouse bite” appearance until you smooth it out. This is because all the tabs will have snapped in half along the outlines of the holes.

 

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