High-Density Interconnect (HDI) PCBs: Lightweight, Compact, and Reliable Solutions

Miniaturized electronic circuit boards are used in various industries: consumer electronics and communication systems, automotive & aerospace industry & health care & several other applications. In all these industries, HDI circuit boards or high-density interconnects (HDI PCBs) are of immense value. HDI technology shall allow the designing and manufacturing of products with low form factor at nearly the same cost of manufacturing as the standard products with the same quality, performance, and board reliability.

High-Density PCBs

High density of placements of components and / or denser interconnection provided on any printed circuit board makes it a high density PCB or high density interconnect PCB. These PCBs provide even more wiring density per unit area than the previously used PCBs.

High-density PCBs consist of:

• Microvias
• Blind and buried vias
• Layers with through vias
• coreless construction with pairs of layers
• An assortment of coreless constructions with layer pairs
• This means having no substrate construction to create any form of electrical connections.
• More of these interconnections

New high-density boards are dense and create a new set of rules that define smaller dimension boards, pads, vias, spaces, and trace width. Due to the dense wiring pattern in the HDI boards, they are classified as lightweight, miniaturized circuit boards having less number of layers. The potential of saving PCBs within a particular product is worthwhile to substitute a few PCBs with an HDI board.

Advantages of HDI PCBs

High-density printed circuit boards are widely used in portable electronics like touch panels, mobile phones, tablets, PC, digital cameras, laptops, etc High density interconnect boards are tinier in size compared to regular boards but they don’t in any way affect the efficiency of the board.  The advantages of HDI PCBs are:

Light weight and compact sizing – The use of more components on both sides of HDI circuit boards results into more compact and lighter PCBs with additional function.

Multiple boards - With the help of HDI technology, the amount of the raw material, the number of layers and sometimes even the number of boards can be less, which creates over cost effect. 

Minimized cost and High Density –This shows that the performance increases with increased reliability in HDI boards due to closer components & high transistors per unit area. Compared with other printed circuit board designs, there are relatively fewer signal integrity problems, and a considerable reduction in crossing delays, lost signals, etc. Micro vias also have a tremendously transformative effect as compared to through holes on the reliability of the HDI board because of the small aspect ratio of micro vias and their superior fabrication.

The time to market – The manufacturing of PCBs for the HDI circuit boards also offers remarkable design for productions here the time for market is reduced considerably. In addition, / with HDI boards/ design and testing is also accelerated.”