Seeed Studio Adds Detailed Tracking to Fusion PCB Manufacturing Service, Offers Panellisation Advice

Seeed Studio has upgraded its printed circuit board production and assembly (PCB and PCBA) service, Seeed Fusion, with detailed status updates for each step of the production process — and, at the same time, has published advice on PCB panellisation.

"It’s been on our to-do list for a long time and you’ve constantly been nagging at us to get it done — now it’s finally online," writes Seeed's Carmen Zheng in a blog post announcing the feature. "We’ve upgraded the PCB and PCB assembly order production statuses so you can have a better idea of how your order is coming along. Worried your order has gotten stuck? Taking a little longer than usual? Just log into your account, go to your Order History and click for more details."

Each stage of the order process — panel preparation, inner-layer etching, inner-layer automated optical inspection, lamination, drilling, drill-hole plating, circuit plating and etching, outer-layer automated optical inspection, solder mask application, silk-screening, surface finish application, in-circuit testing, board routing, and quality checking — is detailed with photographs in the company's announcement.

Not all orders will be trackable using the new, more detailed status updates, however: "Please note that not all PCB orders (notably Premium and Advanced orders) will have detailed production statuses," Zheng admits, "but that does not mean they are not being processed! If in doubt, ask our support team."

At the same time, Zheng has published a second article on designing PCBs for panellisation — the process by which small circuit boards are efficiently produced on far larger PCB sheets. "Printed circuit boards can come in all shapes and sizes, which presents various challenges to board designers when constructing the panel layout," Zheng explains. "To illustrate the range of issues possible, we present three different cases where poor panellisation resulted in production difficulties at Seeed’s assembly facilities, and the subsequent solutions."

Seeed Fusion is available for PCB production and assembly now, via the company's official website.