| Leicester Circuits has been working closely with manufacturers of LED based products for nearly a decade. Architectural and industrial lighting designers have been migrating to LED technology, abandoning traditional lamps or bulbs because of the lower production and installation costs. However, high intensity LED's create problems of heat, especially when closely grouped clusters are involved. Excessive heat generated on a standard printed circuit board results in inefficient thermal transfer and allows isolated “hotspots” beneath devices. The use of a heat sink aids thermal dissipation but is limited by the inefficient FR4.
Leicester Circuits manufacture metal backed circuit boards by bonding a metal plate of various thickness' to a range of high thermally dissipating dielectrics, allowing the heat to be spread across the entire area of the PCB and through to the metal base efficiently and without locking heat into isolated areas. This technology can be applied to the commonly used single sided pcb but also to PTH and multilayer designs.
FR4 dielectric can be utilised where possible and improved with the addition of thermal via holes plated directly to a copper base or by using in combination with thermal dielectrics in multilayer applications. Leicester Circuits has considerable experience in manufacturing metal backed PCBs using metals such as aluminium and copper and offers very competitive pricing. Metal backed PCBs can be manufactured with aluminium or copper metal in various thicknesses and with a choice of solder mask and legend colours. Final profiling of metal backed circuits can be routed, supplied as individual circuits or supplied in a v-cut panel. Our highly experienced engineering team specialises in custom circuit board layouts, thermal management, as well as LED circuit design including LED metal core PCB's. | |
