Silk Screen/Legend


Superior quality PCB silk screen and legend

Silk Screen or Ident is one the last printing step in manufacturing a circuit board before V-scoring, and Routing. A silk screen layer contains information that is helpful to engineers and technicians doing the PCB assembly and troubleshooting.

In short, it is an information hub for engineers, designers and anyone who will be handling the PCB. Here is a quick list of information generally found on a Silk Screen:
• Identification and Reference numbers
• Component values
• Pin 1 indicators
• Part numbers for PCB and PCBA
• Component outlines
• Company Logos
• Regulatory marks
• Manufacturer marks – logo, serial number, date

Usually, Silk Screen has least of the problems, but some issues like silk screen discoloration may occur and in very rare cases flake up of the screen. Things to take care when printing a silkscreen:

a) Silk Screen should not be printed on the components that will be soldered.
b) Very thick or thin of Silk Screen will defeat the very purpose of having a silk screen – reading the key information about the board. Therefore, defining the line widths is important.
c) Space of 150 μm between the solder pad and print must be kept.

We have Orbotech Sprint 150 to manufacture high-end legend designs in high mix production of HDI and MLB PCBs. It gives a high precision image using Direct Imaging (DI) process of using a Laser Beam and Mercury Lamp to imprint the image of a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) directly on photo-sensitive resist without the use of a photo tool. The machine uses UCI (UV Curing Integrated) Technology™ to produce a superior quality PCB with silk screen of your choice. This process is much faster as well as saves production time in meeting client’s urgent timelines. We can do bar coding and serial # on this machine. We also use Liquid Photo Imaging (LPI) technique to apply silk screen on PCBs if any customer is looking for fine print and the smallest size of silk screen we can do is 5 mil.