Through-Glass Vias And The Long Road To Glass Substrates

May 25, 2026 by Maya Posch 16 Comments

Glass-based substrates are slowly beginning to push out organic substrates – as also commonly used in PCBs – due to often superior material properties for packaging. One area where glass substrates have however struggled is with through-hole vias and providing the conductive copper path through them. A 2024 article by [Keith Best] gives a good overview of the topic, with recent news showing how much companies like Intel are pushing for glass substrates, specifically for the packaging of dies.

One major advantage with vias in glass substrates is that they can be much smaller, enabling smaller than 0.1 mm diameter holes with far finer pitch. The challenge here is to make perfect holes with a laser that are defect-free, as well as have the intended diameter.

After that this through-glass via (TGV) has to be coated or filled with copper, much like their organic equivalent. Said TGV can be fully filled with copper, or use plating and add dielectric filler. Detecting flaws in such a finished TGV is important.

In a 2025 review article of glass substrate technologies by [Pratik Nimbalkar] et al. published in Chips the state of the art at the time was covered. The need for ever higher-density integration options with ASICs is highlight here, especially now that many chips today consist of multiple interconnected dies inside a single package.

The complications of creating TGVs with femtosecond laser pulses in Borofloat 33 glass are highlighted by [Daniel Franz] et al. in a 2025 research article, with microcracks and backside ablation observed without proper precautions, something which previously was often resolved by an etching step following said laser drilling. The main issue here is the post-drilling residual stress from the thermal shock, which the authors demonstrate can be largely prevented with careful tweaking of the laser drilling parameters.

As pointed out in a 2024 review article by [Chen Yu] et al. glass substrates are useful for far more than just high-density chip packaging. Glass substrates are also chemically resistant, have a higher heat resistance, are largely transparent to RF and can be hermetically sealed against outside influences. This makes them great for various advanced sensors and communication devices.

Meanwhile, if you wanted to do some metal-depositing on glass at home, we covered this recently.

A desk fan with an air filter. On the side, the final assembled PCB is visible.

Making A PCB The Old-Fashioned Way

May 21, 2026 by Julian Scheffers 57 Comments

Nearly all modern PCBs are designed with the help of EDA software, but not all of them. [ALTco] shows us the process of plotting out a board the old-fashioned way — by hand.

Back in the day, drawing out the traces on a PCB lead to beautiful, smooth lines that [ALTco] wanted to imitate. But first, he needed to figure out how the rest of the fabrication process worked. He starts by just experimenting, both with the “resist” markers and paint, and the etching compound. Things rarely work first-try, and neither did his home-made etchant. So then it was time to buy some ferric chloride, the standard copper etchant for PBCs. A few more tests sorted out which permanent marker worked best.

[ALTco] starts by thoroughly cleaning a raw copper-clad board so the marker sticks properly, then draws the circuit for a little analog fan controller. The board is then laid in a bath of the etchant for several minutes while gently rocking it to keep the reaction going. Finally the board is taken out, etchant stored for re-use, and the board washed with water and then presumably IPA to remove the remaining marker. Some assembly of the newly-printed circuit board later and you have a cute little smoke absorber for your soldering projects.

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Two printed circuit boards made from 3D prints and copper foil. One white and one black substrate.

Using 3D Printers To Make Circuit Boards

May 19, 2026 by Julian Scheffers 60 Comments

Custom printed circuit boards have become more and more accessible to the average hobbyist over the last decade. But one problem still remains: your circuits will take at least a couple days to make. But what if you needed some really rapid prototypes? [The Raccoon Lab] shows us how to do it with a 3D printer.

You start with the usual hobby PCB pipeline: take your idea, make a schematic, and then lay it out in KiCad. That’s where the changes start: to keep traces strong, they are made very thick. The PCB is then exported and opened in 3D CAD software, where the traces are extruded to be 2 mm tall. Off to the printer! The newly printed “circuit board” is made conductive by applying copper tape to it, and traces are cut out along their raised edges.

The result is a very quick and dirty PCB. Sure, it isn’t exactly production-ready, but for just about any simple microcontroller project it’ll do just fine, and it’s a whole lot more accessible than milling one using a CNC! We’ve seen a few variations on this approach recently, including some custom software designed to help along the process.
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Another Gift To The World From CERN: Their Entire Set Of KiCad Libraries

May 12, 2026 by Jenny List 69 Comments

As the foremost boffins of Europe toil deep underneath the border between Switzerland and France in their never-ending quest to truly understand the fabric of the Universe, they rely on a vast amount of electronics. The PCB layout team at the particle accelerator thus work with a huge array of parts, for which of course they create KiCad libraries. Now the folks at CERN have made those libraries available as open source, so you can benefit from their work.

The libraries themselves can be found in a GitLab repository, and at the moment are offered only for KiCad version 9.x. We tried installing it in our KiCad 10.0 installation and it refused — complaining of a missing JSON file — but we’re assuming that with more time and effort we could have made it happen. We’re told official 10.x compatibility is on the way.

Browsing the repository shows what a multiplicity of parts are included, so we can see this becoming a standard install for many people and the CERN footprints turning up in many projects featured here.

Thanks [Daniel] for the tip!

You’ve Seen The Chip Shortage And The Memory Shortage, Now Prepare For The PCB Shortage

May 6, 2026 by Jenny List 45 Comments

It’s nice to hide away in our little corner of the internet and talk tech, safely away from the turmoil of world events. Sometimes though, geopolitics intrude even into our space, and Reuters are here reporting on a new concern that will probably affect many Hackaday readers. Conflict in the Gulf of Arabia, and in particular raids on Saudi petrochemical plants, is threatening PCB production far away in China.

Most of us probably have a mental image of tankers sailing through the Strait of Hormuz laden with Gulf crude, off to be processed by refineries somewhere else in the world. Certainly a load of oil takes just that route, but for the Saudis and other oil-producing nations in the region, it also makes economic sense to site petrochemical industries at source. They export the much more valuable refined products, among which is the polymer resin used in PCB production. The Reuters report says that consequent to this and a rise in copper prices, the cost of a PCB in China has risen by 40%. Naturally this doesn’t sound like good news.

Here at Hackaday, when it comes to component shortages this isn’t our first rodeo. We’re in the middle of a memory shortage due to AI companies, and the COVID-era chip shortage is still fresh in our minds. Unfortunately, this type of thing as been a regular of the technology world for decades. Here we are with another one, and should we be worried? In the short term it’s certainly a concern as the Gulf conflict is still searching for an end to its uneasy stalemate, but remembering previous shortages we think that global industry will adapt and expand other sources where necessary. Just as with the similar IC encapsulation resin shortage back in the ’90s, it may eventually be the panic more than the shortage which becomes responsible for the price hikes.

We’ve taken an abstract look at global electronic supply chains before.

Header image: Gabriela P., CC BY 4.0.

Using A Fiber Laser To Etch 0.1 Mm PCB Traces

March 24, 2026 by Maya Posch 15 Comments

Creating PCBs at home is quite easy these days (vias not withstanding), but even the best DIY methods usually can’t match the resolution offered by commercial PCB production lines. Large traces are easy enough to carve out of copper-backed FR1 or FR4 with even a mill, what if you need something more like 100 µm sized traces with similar clearance? This is what [Giangix] has been experimenting with, using both a fiber laser and chemical etching to see what approach gives the best results.

The thin copper clad boards are put on the 20 Watt fiber laser and held in place with the vacuum table that [Giangix] previously made, using the power of suction to make sure the board doesn’t move. The used laser specifies a minimum line width of 0.01 mm, so that’s clearly fine enough to engrave away the chemical resist layer that is sprayed on top of the copper layer.

After some experimentation, it was found that increasing the trace clearance between the 0.1 mm traces to a hair above 0.1 mm was necessary for the subsequent chemical etching step to work the best, as otherwise some copper was still likely to remain. The chemical etching bath mixture consists of hydrochloric acid and hydrogen peroxide, in a ratio of 2 mL water to 2 mL 30% HCl and 2 drops of 35% H2O2. This is agitated for 90 s to get a pretty good result.

Although the final resistance measurements on the traces is a bit higher than theoretical, comments suggest that maybe some of the copper got removed along with the removal of the resist layer. Perhaps the most interesting question here is whether directly ablating the copper using the fiber laser would give even better results and bypass the etching chemicals.

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X-Ray A PCB Virtually

February 23, 2026 by Al Williams 24 Comments

If you want to reverse engineer a PC board, you could do worse than X-ray it. But thanks to [Philip Giacalone], you could just take a photo, load it into PCB Tracer, and annotate the images. You can see a few of a series of videos about the system below.

The tracer runs in your browser. It can let you mark traces, vias, components, and pads. You can annotate everything as you document it, and it can even call an AI model to help generate a schematic from the net list.

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