A New Approach for Evaluating the Topological Accuracy of Circuit Boards Made by 3D Printing

Present-day printed circuit boards (PCB) are quite complex products with a very laborious processes of development and production, while the requirements for them continue to harden. With a view to ensuring them, there is an active development and implementation of progressive production processes, including 3D printing . Due to the fact that a significant deviation in the dimensions and / or positions of the elements of the PCB conductive pattern can lead to a loss of functional properties of the product, one of the important parameters of technological processes is the provided topological accuracy (TA), which is affected by the manufacturing technology. On the basis thereof, to ensure the TA of PCB, it is necessary to conduct a set of studies, including an analysis of existing approaches to its assessment, with regard to the possibility of their application for 3D printing. There is a proposal of the approach, which is based on the assumption that Yu. B. Tsvetkov together with the hypothesis supposition that each single-type component of the alignment error (i.e., angular rotation, scale distortions (stretch-compression) and shape distortions (trapezoid, shift) could be represented as a repositioning and as a shape of a given geometric figure in two-dimensional space. The proposed approach could be applied not only for PCBs produced by 3D printing methods, but also for the boards, which are manufactured using standard technologies.