I believe many people are not unfamiliar with PCB circuit boards, and they may often hear them in daily life, but they may not know much about PCBA, and may even be confused with PCB. So what is a PCB? How did PCBA evolve? What is the difference between PCB and PCBA? Let's learn more about it.

About PCB
PCB is short for Printed Circuit Board, because it is made by electronic printing, that's why it is called "printed" circuit board. PCB is an important electronic component in the electronics industry, a support for electronic components, and a carrier for electrical connection of electronic components. PCB has been extremely widely used in the manufacturing of electronic products. The unique characteristics of PCBs are summarized as follows.

1. High wiring density, small size and light weight, which is conducive to the miniaturization of electronic equipment.
2. Due to the repeatability and consistency of the graphics, the errors in wiring and assembly are reduced, and the maintenance, debugging and inspection time of the equipment are saved.
3. It is conducive to mechanization and automatic production, which improves labor productivity and reduces the cost of electronic equipment.
4. The design can be standardized to facilitate interchange.

About PCBA
PCBA is short for printed circuit board + assembly, which means PCBA is the whole process of PCB board SMT loading and dip plug-in.

Note: both SMT and DIP are ways to integrate parts on PCB. The main difference is that SMT does not need to drill holes on PCB, and pins of parts need to be inserted into drilled holes in dip.

SMT (Surface Mounted Technology), mainly uses a mounter to mount micro and small parts on the PCB board. The production process is: PCB board positioning, solder paste printing, mounter mounting, and reflow oven and finished inspection.

Dip stands for "Dual Inline Package", that is to insert parts on PCB board manually. This is when some parts are larger in size and not suitable for SMT technology, plug-in is used to integrate parts. Its main production process is: sticking back glue, plug-in, inspection, wave soldering, plate brushing and finished inspection.

The difference between PCB and PCBA

From the above introduction, we know that PCBA generally refers to a process flow, and also it is a piece of finished circuit board. After all the processes on the PCB are completed, we call it PCBA. The PCB refers to an empty printed circuit board with no parts on it.

In general: PCBA is a finished board; PCB is a bare board.