Aluminium Backed PCB’s or Insulated Metal Substrate PCB’s

Aluminium backed PCB’s are now being used in place of traditional FR4 PCBs for high power LED applications. This is due to rapidly changing developments in LED technology, with brighter more powerful LED’s coming on to the market all most daily. This raised a problem to designers and PCB manufactures with larger amounts of heat being generated by the components, the answer came along on the form of Aluminium backed PCB’s with the use of thermally conductive pre-preg between the copper and the aluminium the thermal performance is 8–10 times better than a standard epoxy glass (FR4) PCB.

The simplest type as a conventional PCB with a single layer of copper for your surface mount components with the thermally conductive pre-preg bonding the copper to your aluminium base (see figure 1) this is also the cheapest type of aluminium PCB.

Figure 1

Both double sided PTH and multilayer Aluminium backed PCB’s are also manufacturable use the same processes (see figure 2).

Figure 2

Another common practice with LED application PCB’s is the use of White or Black solder resist to reflect light or to help in heat removal. Standard colour solder resist & legend inks can also be applied. A range of surface finishes can be applied, Hot Air Solder Level (HASL) Spb Not RoHS Compliant, Electroless Silver, Electroless Nickel Immersion Gold, Electrolytic Gold (Hard Gold) and OSP (Organic Solderability Preservatives). PW Circuits have invested in two SEL R100 3 axis router’s with customised wet routing features to ensure a burr free profiled aluminium edge.

Contact us today so we can quote all your PCB requirements.