title: Showtime (TV network)

text: In December 2006, Showtime announced a deal to broadcast mixed martial arts matches from the then-newly formed Elite Xtreme Combat (or EliteXC), an MMA organization formed by Showtime Networks and ProElite, Inc., with all events broadcast under the banner "ShoXC"; the league folded two years later in 2008.


title: Showtime (TV network)

text: In 2008, Showtime acquired "Inside the NFL", the longest-running program in the history of HBO, from that network after it had cancelled the seasonal analysis and interview program in February of that year; "Inside the NFL" moved to Showtime that September.


title: Showtime (TV network)

text: In February 2009, mixed martial arts promotion Strikeforce announced a three-year broadcast agreement with Showtime, allowing it to broadcast up to 16 events per year, as well as a deal with sister network CBS for an option to produce up to four events for that network; Strikeforce ended its run on Showtime when the league folded in January 2013. In addition to broadcasting big-ticket Strikeforce events on Showtime, the promotion also announced it would produce "ShoMMA: Strikeforce Challengers", an event series highlighting up-and-coming fighters.


title: Showtime (TV network)

text: In 2010, Showtime debuted another original sports insider program, "Inside NASCAR", focusing on interviews and analysis from around the NASCAR circuit. In 2011, Showtime expanded its MMA programming by televising events produced by M-1 Global, the Russian PTC company of popular Strikeforce fighter Fedor Emelianenko. In November 2012, Showtime debuted a sports-themed spinoff of CBS' long-running newsmagazine "60 Minutes", titled "60 Minutes Sports".


title: Showtime (TV network)

text: From 2012 to 2015, Showtime also aired an hour-long program called "Jim Rome on Showtime", featuring the CBS Sports Radio host's commentary and interviews with personalities in the sports world.


title: Showtime (TV network)

text: On February 9, 2021, it was announced that Showtime would be the exclusive home of Bellator MMA beginning with Bellator 255 on April 2 (the ViacomCBS merger made Bellator and Showtime corporate siblings). This will be the first time mixed martial arts has aired on Showtime since Strikeforce was absorbed by the UFC.


title: Showtime (TV network)

text: Outside of the United States, several pay television networks have utilized the Showtime name and former logo through licensing agreements with Showtime Networks for some period of time, such as Showtime Australia, Showtime Arabia, Showtime Scandinavia and Spain's Showtime Extreme. Showtime launched a South African version as part of the new TopTV satellite provider's package on May 1, 2010.


title: Showtime (TV network)

text: In January 2015, CBS announced an exclusive Canadian brand and content licensing agreement with domestic broadcaster Bell Media, under which Showtime programming would air exclusively on Bell's services including The Movie Network and CraveTV (later consolidated under the Crave name); prior to this, The Movie Network and now-defunct counterpart Movie Central had been licensing Canadian rights to current Showtime programming. Later that year, Chinese streamer PPTV agreed to a multiyear license to stream CBS and Showtime series in the country, giving 400 million users access to select Showtime series from CBS.


title: Showtime (TV network)

text: Showtime programming is also distributed in selected countries through localized versions of Paramount+, including Australia, the United Kingdom and Ireland.


title: Showtime (TV network)

text: SkyShowtime is a joint-venture between Paramount Global's Showtime and Comcast's Sky Group that combines programming from the corporations' Paramount+ and Peacock services. SkyShowtime launched in European markets where Sky does not operate their satellite and cable services, with viewers in countries like the United Kingdom and Ireland getting access to both Paramount+ and Peacock on their Sky Q and NOW boxes along with Sky Glass television sets instead.


title: Showtime (TV network)

text: The streaming platform was recently launched in the Nordic countries on September 20, 2022, where they've replaced from the previously operated Paramount+. They later arrived on the Netherlands and Portugal on October 25, 2022. On December 14, 2022, SkyShowtime launched in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro and Kosovo.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: A nuclear power plant (NPP) is a thermal power station in which the heat source is a nuclear reactor. As is typical of thermal power stations, heat is used to generate steam that drives a steam turbine connected to a generator that produces electricity. , the International Atomic Energy Agency reported there were 422 nuclear power reactors in operation in 32 countries around the world, and 57 nuclear power reactors under construction.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: Nuclear plants are very often used for base load since their operations, maintenance, and fuel costs are at the lower end of the spectrum of costs.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: However, building a nuclear power plant often spans five to ten years, which can accrue to significant financial costs, depending on how the initial investments are financed.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: Nuclear power plants have a carbon footprint comparable to that of renewable energy such as solar farms and wind farms, and much lower than fossil fuels such as natural gas and brown coal. Despite some spectacular catastrophes, nuclear power plants are among the safest mode of electricity generation, comparable to solar and wind power plants.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: The first time that heat from a nuclear reactor was used to generate electricity was on December 21, 1951 at the Experimental Breeder Reactor I, feeding four light bulbs.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: On June 27, 1954, the world's first nuclear power station to generate electricity for a power grid, the Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant, commenced operations in Obninsk, in the Soviet Union.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: The world's first full scale power station, Calder Hall in the United Kingdom, opened on October 17, 1956. The world's first full scale power station solely devoted to electricity production—Calder Hall was also meant to produce plutonium—the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania, United States—was connected to the grid on December 18, 1957.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: The conversion to electrical energy takes place indirectly, as in conventional thermal power stations. The fission in a nuclear reactor heats the reactor coolant. The coolant may be water or gas, or even liquid metal, depending on the type of reactor. The reactor coolant then goes to a steam generator and heats water to produce steam. The pressurized steam is then usually fed to a multi-stage steam turbine. After the steam turbine has expanded and partially condensed the steam, the remaining vapor is condensed in a condenser. The condenser is a heat exchanger which is connected to a secondary side such as a river or a cooling tower. The water is then pumped back into the steam generator and the cycle begins again. The water-steam cycle corresponds to the Rankine cycle.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: The nuclear reactor is the heart of the station. In its central part, the reactor's core produces heat due to nuclear fission. With this heat, a coolant is heated as it is pumped through the reactor and thereby removes the energy from the reactor. The heat from nuclear fission is used to raise steam, which runs through turbines, which in turn power the electrical generators.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: Nuclear reactors usually rely on uranium to fuel the chain reaction. Uranium is a very heavy metal that is abundant on Earth and is found in sea water as well as most rocks. Naturally occurring uranium is found in two different isotopes: uranium-238 (U-238), accounting for 99.3% and uranium-235 (U-235) accounting for about 0.7%. U-238 has 146 neutrons and U-235 has 143 neutrons.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: Different isotopes have different behaviors. For instance, U-235 is fissile which means that it is easily split and gives off a lot of energy making it ideal for nuclear energy. On the other hand, U-238 does not have that property despite it being the same element. Different isotopes also have different half-lives. U-238 has a longer half-life than U-235, so it takes longer to decay over time. This also means that U-238 is less radioactive than U-235.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: Since nuclear fission creates radioactivity, the reactor core is surrounded by a protective shield. This containment absorbs radiation and prevents radioactive material from being released into the environment. In addition, many reactors are equipped with a dome of concrete to protect the reactor against both internal casualties and external impacts.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: The purpose of the steam turbine is to convert the heat contained in steam into mechanical energy. The engine house with the steam turbine is usually structurally separated from the main reactor building. It is aligned so as to prevent debris from the destruction of a turbine in operation from flying towards the reactor.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: In the case of a pressurized water reactor, the steam turbine is separated from the nuclear system. To detect a leak in the steam generator and thus the passage of radioactive water at an early stage, an activity meter is mounted to track the outlet steam of the steam generator. In contrast, boiling water reactors pass radioactive water through the steam turbine, so the turbine is kept as part of the radiologically controlled area of the nuclear power station.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: The electric generator converts mechanical power supplied by the turbine into electrical power. Low-pole AC synchronous generators of high rated power are used. A cooling system removes heat from the reactor core and transports it to another area of the station, where the thermal energy can be harnessed to produce electricity or to do other useful work. Typically the hot coolant is used as a heat source for a boiler, and the pressurized steam from that drives one or more steam turbine driven electrical generators.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: In the event of an emergency, safety valves can be used to prevent pipes from bursting or the reactor from exploding. The valves are designed so that they can derive all of the supplied flow rates with little increase in pressure. In the case of the BWR, the steam is directed into the suppression chamber and condenses there. The chambers on a heat exchanger are connected to the intermediate cooling circuit.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: The main condenser is a large cross-flow shell and tube heat exchanger that takes wet vapor, a mixture of liquid water and steam at saturation conditions, from the turbine-generator exhaust and condenses it back into sub-cooled liquid water so it can be pumped back to the reactor by the condensate and feedwater pumps.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: In the main condenser, the wet vapor turbine exhaust come into contact with thousands of tubes that have much colder water flowing through them on the other side. The cooling water typically come from a natural body of water such as a river or lake.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, located in the desert about west of Phoenix, Arizona, is the only nuclear facility that does not use a natural body of water for cooling, instead it uses treated sewage from the greater Phoenix metropolitan area.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: The water coming from the cooling body of water is either pumped back to the water source at a warmer temperature or returns to a cooling tower where it either cools for more uses or evaporates into water vapor that rises out the top of the tower.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: The water level in the steam generator and the nuclear reactor is controlled using the feedwater system. The feedwater pump has the task of taking the water from the condensate system, increasing the pressure and forcing it into either the steam generators—in the case of a pressurized water reactor — or directly into the reactor, for boiling water reactors.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: Continuous power supply to the plant is critical to ensure safe operation. Most nuclear stations require at least two distinct sources of offsite power for redundancy. These are usually provided by multiple transformers that are sufficiently separated and can receive power from multiple transmission lines. In addition, in some nuclear stations, the turbine generator can power the station's loads while the station is online, without requiring external power. This is achieved via station service transformers which tap power from the generator output before they reach the step-up transformer.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: The economics of nuclear power plants is a controversial subject, and multibillion-dollar investments ride on the choice of an energy source. Nuclear power stations typically have high capital costs, but low direct fuel costs, with the costs of fuel extraction, processing, use and spent fuel storage internalized costs. Therefore, comparison with other power generation methods is strongly dependent on assumptions about construction timescales and capital financing for nuclear stations. Cost estimates take into account station decommissioning and nuclear waste storage or recycling costs in the United States due to the Price Anderson Act.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: With the prospect that all spent nuclear fuel could potentially be recycled by using future reactors, generation IV reactors are being designed to completely close the nuclear fuel cycle. However, up to now, there has not been any actual bulk recycling of waste from a NPP, and on-site temporary storage is still being used at almost all plant sites due to construction problems for deep geological repositories. Only Finland has stable repository plans, therefore from a worldwide perspective, long-term waste storage costs are uncertain.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: Construction, or capital cost aside, measures to mitigate global warming such as a carbon tax or carbon emissions trading, increasingly favor the economics of nuclear power. Further efficiencies are hoped to be achieved through more advanced reactor designs, Generation III reactors promise to be at least 17% more fuel efficient, and have lower capital costs, while Generation IV reactors promise further gains in fuel efficiency and significant reductions in nuclear waste.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: In Eastern Europe, a number of long-established projects are struggling to find financing, notably Belene in Bulgaria and the additional reactors at Cernavodă in Romania, and some potential backers have pulled out. Where cheap gas is available and its future supply relatively secure, this also poses a major problem for nuclear projects.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: Analysis of the economics of nuclear power must take into account who bears the risks of future uncertainties. To date all operating nuclear power stations were developed by state-owned or regulated utilities where many of the risks associated with construction costs, operating performance, fuel price, and other factors were borne by consumers rather than suppliers. Many countries have now liberalized the electricity market where these risks and the risk of cheaper competitors emerging before capital costs are recovered, are borne by station suppliers and operators rather than consumers, which leads to a significantly different evaluation of the economics of new nuclear power stations.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: Following the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan, costs are likely to go up for currently operating and new nuclear power stations, due to increased requirements for on-site spent fuel management and elevated design basis threats. However many designs, such as the currently under construction AP1000, use passive nuclear safety cooling systems, unlike those of Fukushima I which required active cooling systems, which largely eliminates the need to spend more on redundant back up safety equipment.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: Modern nuclear reactor designs have had numerous safety improvements since the first-generation nuclear reactors. A nuclear power plant cannot explode like a nuclear weapon because the fuel for uranium reactors is not enriched enough, and nuclear weapons require precision explosives to force fuel into a small enough volume to go supercritical. Most reactors require continuous temperature control to prevent a core meltdown, which has occurred on a few occasions through accident or natural disaster, releasing radiation and making the surrounding area uninhabitable. Plants must be defended against theft of nuclear material and attack by enemy military planes or missiles.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: The most serious accidents to date have been the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, and the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, corresponding to the beginning of the operation of generation II reactors.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: Professor of sociology Charles Perrow states that multiple and unexpected failures are built into society's complex and tightly-coupled nuclear reactor systems. Such accidents are unavoidable and cannot be designed around. An interdisciplinary team from MIT has estimated that given the expected growth of nuclear power from 2005 to 2055, at least four serious nuclear accidents would be expected in that period. The MIT study does not take into account improvements in safety since 1970.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: The nuclear power debate about the deployment and use of nuclear fission reactors to generate electricity from nuclear fuel for civilian purposes peaked during the 1970s and 1980s, when it "reached an intensity unprecedented in the history of technology controversies," in some countries.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: Proponents argue that nuclear power is a sustainable energy source which reduces carbon emissions and can increase energy security if its use supplants a dependence on imported fuels. Proponents advance the notion that nuclear power produces virtually no air pollution, in contrast to the chief viable alternative of fossil fuel. Proponents also believe that nuclear power is the only viable course to achieve energy independence for most Western countries. They emphasize that the risks of storing waste are small and can be further reduced by using the latest technology in newer reactors, and the operational safety record in the Western world is excellent when compared to the other major kinds of power plants.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: Opponents say that nuclear power poses many threats to people and the environment, and that costs do not justify benefits. Threats include health risks and environmental damage from uranium mining, processing and transport, the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation or sabotage, and the problem of radioactive nuclear waste. Another environmental issue is discharge of hot water into the sea. The hot water modifies the environmental conditions for marine flora and fauna. They also contend that reactors themselves are enormously complex machines where many things can and do go wrong, and there have been many serious nuclear accidents. Critics do not believe that these risks can be reduced through new technology, despite rapid advancements in containment procedures and storage methods.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: Opponents argue that when all the energy-intensive stages of the nuclear fuel chain are considered, from uranium mining to nuclear decommissioning, nuclear power is not a low-carbon electricity source despite the possibility of refinement and long term storage being powered by a nuclear facility. Those countries that do not contain uranium mines cannot achieve energy independence through existing nuclear power technologies. Actual construction costs often exceed estimates, and spent fuel management costs are difficult to define.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: On 1 August 2020, the UAE launched the Arab region's first-ever nuclear energy plant. Unit 1 of the Barakah plant in the Al Dhafrah region of Abu Dhabi commenced generating heat on the first day of its launch, while the remaining 3 Units are being built. However, Nuclear Consulting Group head, Paul Dorfman, warned the Gulf nation's investment into the plant as a risk "further destabilizing the volatile Gulf region, damaging the environment and raising the possibility of nuclear proliferation."


title: Nuclear power plant

text: Nuclear reprocessing technology was developed to chemically separate and recover fissionable plutonium from irradiated nuclear fuel. Reprocessing serves multiple purposes, whose relative importance has changed over time. Originally reprocessing was used solely to extract plutonium for producing nuclear weapons. With the commercialization of nuclear power, the reprocessed plutonium was recycled back into MOX nuclear fuel for thermal reactors. The reprocessed uranium, which constitutes the bulk of the spent fuel material, can in principle also be re-used as fuel, but that is only economic when uranium prices are high or disposal is expensive. Finally, the breeder reactor can employ not only the recycled plutonium and uranium in spent fuel, but all the actinides, closing the nuclear fuel cycle and potentially multiplying the energy extracted from natural uranium by more than 60 times.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: Nuclear reprocessing reduces the volume of high-level waste, but by itself does not reduce radioactivity or heat generation and therefore does not eliminate the need for a geological waste repository. Reprocessing has been politically controversial because of the potential to contribute to nuclear proliferation, the potential vulnerability to nuclear terrorism, the political challenges of repository siting (a problem that applies equally to direct disposal of spent fuel), and because of its high cost compared to the once-through fuel cycle. In the United States, the Obama administration stepped back from President Bush's plans for commercial-scale reprocessing and reverted to a program focused on reprocessing-related scientific research.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: Nuclear power works under an insurance framework that limits or structures accident liabilities in accordance with the Paris Convention on Third Party Liability in the Field of Nuclear Energy, the Brussels supplementary convention, and the Vienna Convention on Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: However states with a majority of the world's nuclear power stations, including the U.S., Russia, China and Japan, are not party to international nuclear liability conventions.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: Nuclear decommissioning is the dismantling of a nuclear power station and decontamination of the site to a state no longer requiring protection from radiation for the general public. The main difference from the dismantling of other power stations is the presence of radioactive material that requires special precautions to remove and safely relocate to a waste repository.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: Decommissioning involves many administrative and technical actions. It includes all clean-up of radioactivity and progressive demolition of the station. Once a facility is decommissioned, there should no longer be any danger of a radioactive accident or to any persons visiting it. After a facility has been completely decommissioned it is released from regulatory control, and the licensee of the station no longer has responsibility for its nuclear safety.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: Generally speaking, nuclear stations were originally designed for a life of about 30 years. Newer stations are designed for a 40 to 60-year operating life. The Centurion Reactor is a future class of nuclear reactor that is being designed to last 100 years.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: One of the major limiting wear factors is the deterioration of the reactor's pressure vessel under the action of neutron bombardment, however in 2018 Rosatom announced it had developed a thermal annealing technique for reactor pressure vessels which ameliorates radiation damage and extends service life by between 15 and 30 years.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: Nuclear stations are used primarily for base load because of economic considerations. The fuel cost of operations for a nuclear station is smaller than the fuel cost for operation of coal or gas plants. Since most of the cost of nuclear power plant is capital cost, there is almost no cost saving by running it at less than full capacity.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: Nuclear power plants are routinely used in load following mode on a large scale in France, although "it is generally accepted that this is not an ideal economic situation for nuclear stations." Unit A at the decommissioned German Biblis Nuclear Power Plant was designed to modulate its output 15% per minute between 40% to 100% of its nominal power.


title: Nuclear power plant

text: Russia has led in the practical development of floating nuclear power stations, which can be transported to the desired location and occasionally relocated or moved for easier decommissioning. In 2022, the United States Department of Energy funded a three-year research study of offshore floating nuclear power generation. In October 2022, NuScale Power and Canadian company Prodigy announced a joint project to bring a North American small modular reactor based floating plant to market.


title: Voyeurism

text: Voyeurism is the sexual interest in or practice of watching other people engaged in intimate behaviors, such as undressing, sexual activity, or other actions of a private nature.


title: Voyeurism

text: The term comes from the French "voir" which means "to see". A male voyeur is commonly labelled as "Peeping Tom" or a "Jags", a term which originates from the Lady Godiva legend. However, that term is usually applied to a male who observes somebody secretly and, generally, not in a public space.


title: Voyeurism

text: The American Psychiatric Association has classified certain voyeuristic fantasies, urges and behaviour patterns as a paraphilia in the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual" (DSM-IV) if the person has acted on these urges, or the sexual urges or fantasies cause marked distress or interpersonal difficulty. It is described as a disorder of sexual preference in the ICD-10. The DSM-IV defines voyeurism as the act of looking at "unsuspecting individuals, usually strangers, who are naked, in the process of disrobing, or engaging in sexual activity". The diagnosis would not be given to people who experience typical sexual arousal simply by seeing nudity or sexual activity. In order to be diagnosed with voyeuristic disorder the symptoms must persist for over six months and the person in question must be over the age of 18.


title: Voyeurism

text: There is relatively little academic research regarding voyeurism. When a review was published in 1976 there were only 15 available resources. Voyeurs were well-paying hole-lookers in especially Parisian brothels, a commercial innovation described as far back as 1857 but not gaining much notoriety until the 1880s, and not attracting formal medical-forensic recognition until the early 1890s. Society has accepted the use of the term voyeur as a description of anyone who views the intimate lives of others, even outside of a sexual context. This term is specifically used regarding reality television and other media which allow people to view the personal lives of others. This is a reversal from the historical perspective, moving from a term which describes a specific population in detail, to one which describes the general population vaguely.


title: Voyeurism

text: One of the few historical theories on the causes of voyeurism comes from psychoanalytic theory. Psychoanalytic theory proposes that voyeurism results from a failure to accept castration anxiety and as a result of failure to identify with the father.


title: Voyeurism

text: Voyeurism has high prevalence rates in most studied populations. Voyeurism was initially believed to only be present in a small portion of the population. This perception changed when Alfred Kinsey discovered that 30% of men prefer coitus with the lights on. This behaviour is not considered voyeurism by today's diagnostic standards, but there was little differentiation between normal and pathological behaviour at the time. Subsequent research showed that 65% of men had engaged in peeping, which suggests that this behaviour is widely spread throughout the population. Congruent with this, research found voyeurism to be the most common sexual law-breaking behaviour in both clinical and general populations.


title: Voyeurism

text: An earlier study, based on 60 college men from a rural area, indicates that 54% had voyeuristic fantasies, and that 42% had tried voyeurism, concluding that young men are more easily aroused by the idea.


title: Voyeurism

text: In a national study of Sweden it was found that 7.7% of the population (16% of men and 4% of women) had engaged in voyeurism at some point. It is also believed that voyeurism occurs up to 150 times more frequently than police reports indicate. This same study also indicates that there are high levels of co-occurrence between voyeurism and exhibitionism, finding that 63% of voyeurs also report exhibitionist behaviour.


title: Voyeurism

text: People engage in voyeuristic behaviours for diverse reasons, but statistics can indicate which groups are likelier to engage in the act.


title: Voyeurism

text: Early research indicated that voyeurs were more mentally healthy than other groups with paraphilias. Compared to the other groups studied, it was found that voyeurs were unlikely to be alcoholics or drug users. More recent research shows that, compared to the general population, voyeurs were moderately more likely to have psychological problems, use alcohol and drugs, and have higher sexual interest generally. This study also shows that voyeurs have a greater number of sexual partners per year, and are more likely to have had a same-sex partner than most of the populations. Both older and newer research found that voyeurs typically have a later age of first sexual intercourse. However, other research found no difference in sexual history between voyeurs and non-voyeurs. Voyeurs who are not also exhibitionists tend to be from a higher socioeconomic status than those who do show exhibitionist behaviour.


title: Voyeurism

text: Research shows that, like almost all paraphilias, voyeurism is more common in men than in women. However, research has found that men and women both report roughly the same likelihood that they would hypothetically engage in voyeurism. There appears to be a greater gender difference when actually presented with the opportunity to perform voyeurism. There is very little research done on voyeurism in women, so very little is known on the subject. One of the few studies deals with a case study of a woman who also had schizoid personality disorder, which limits the degree to which it can generalize to normal populations.


title: Voyeurism

text: A 2021 study found that 36.4% of men and 63.8% of women were strongly repulsed by the idea of voyeurism. Men were more likely to be mildly or moderately aroused than women, but there was little gender difference among those who reported strong arousal. Men reported slightly higher willingness to commit voyeurism but, when risk is introduced, willingness diminishes in both sexes proportionally to the risk involved. Individual differences in sociosexuality and sexual compulsivity were found to contribute to the sex differences in voyeurism.


title: Voyeurism

text: Lovemap theory suggests that voyeurism exists because looking at naked others shifts from an ancillary sexual behaviour, to a primary sexual act. This results in a displacement of sexual desire making the act of watching someone the primary means of sexual satisfaction.


title: Voyeurism

text: Voyeurism has also been linked with obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). When treated by the same approach as OCD, voyeuristic behaviours significantly decrease.


title: Voyeurism

text: Historically voyeurism has been treated in a variety of ways. Psychoanalytic, group psychotherapy and shock aversion approaches have all been attempted with limited success. There is some evidence which shows that pornography can be used as a form of treatment for voyeurism. This is based on the idea that countries with pornography censorship have high amounts of voyeurism. Additionally shifting voyeurs from voyeuristic behaviour, to looking at graphic pornography, to looking at the nudes in Playboy has been successfully used as a treatment. These studies show that pornography can be used as a means of satisfying voyeuristic desires without breaking the law.


title: Voyeurism

text: Voyeurism has also been successfully treated with a mix of anti-psychotics and antidepressants. However the patient in this case study had a multitude of other mental health problems. Intense pharmaceutical treatment may not be required for most voyeurs.


title: Voyeurism

text: There has also been success in treating voyeurism through using treatment methods for obsessive compulsive disorder. There have been multiple instances of successful treatment of voyeurism through putting patients on fluoxetine and treating their voyeuristic behaviour as a compulsion.


title: Voyeurism

text: The increased miniaturisation of hidden cameras and recording devices since the 1950s has enabled those so minded to surreptitiously photograph or record others without their knowledge and consent. The vast majority of mobile phones, for example, are readily available to be used for their camera and recording ability.


title: Voyeurism

text: The United States FBI assert that some individuals who engage in "nuisance" offences (such as voyeurism) may also have a propensity for violence based on behaviours of serious sex offenders. An FBI researcher has suggested that voyeurs are likely to demonstrate some characteristics that are common, but not universal, among serious sexual offenders who invest considerable time and effort in the capturing of a victim (or image of a victim); careful, methodical planning devoted to the selection and preparation of equipment; and often meticulous attention to detail.


title: Voyeurism

text: Voyeurism is not a crime at common law. In common law countries it is only a crime if made so by legislation.


title: Voyeurism

text: In Canada, for example, voyeurism was not a crime when the case "Frey v. Fedoruk et al." arose in 1947. In that case, in 1950, the Supreme Court of Canada held that courts could not criminalise voyeurism by classifying it as a breach of the peace and that Parliament would have to specifically outlaw it. On November 1, 2005, this was done when section 162 was added to the Canadian "Criminal Code", declaring voyeurism to be a sexual offence when it violates a reasonable expectation of privacy. In the case of R v Jarvis, the Supreme Court of Canada held that for the purposes of that law, the expectation of privacy is not all-or-nothing; rather there are degrees of privacy, and although secondary-school pupils in the school building cannot reasonably expect as much privacy as in the bedroom, nonetheless they can expect enough privacy so that photographing them without their consent for the purpose of sexual gratification is forbidden.


title: Voyeurism

text: In some countries voyeurism is considered to be a sex crime. In the United Kingdom, for example, non-consensual voyeurism became a criminal offence on May 1, 2004. In the English case of "R v Turner" (2006), the manager of a sports centre filmed four women taking showers. There was no indication that the footage had been shown to anyone else or distributed in any way. The defendant pleaded guilty. The Court of Appeal confirmed a sentence of nine months' imprisonment to reflect the seriousness of the abuse of trust and the traumatic effect on the victims.


title: Voyeurism

text: In another English case in 2009, "R v Wilkins" (2010), a man who filmed his intercourse with five of his lovers for his own private viewing was sentenced to eight months in prison and ordered to sign onto the Sex Offender Register for ten years. In 2013, 40-year-old Mark Lancaster was found guilty of voyeurism and jailed for 16 months, after he tricked an 18-year-old student into traveling to a rented flat in Milton Keynes, where he filmed her with four secret cameras dressing up as a schoolgirl and posing for photographs before he had sex with her.


title: Voyeurism

text: In a more recent English case in 2020, the Court of Appeal upheld the conviction of Tony Richards after Richards sought "to have two voyeurism charges under section 67 of the Sexual Offences Act dismissed on the grounds that he had committed no crime". Richards "secretly videoed himself having sex with two women who had consented to sex in return for money but had not agreed to being captured on camera". In an unusual step, the court allowed Emily Hunt, a person not involved in the case, to intervene on behalf of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). Hunt had an ongoing judicial review against the CPS since the CPS had argued that Hunt's alleged attacker had not violated the law when he "took a video lasting over one minute of her naked and unconscious" in a hotel room on the basis that there should be no expectation of privacy in the bedroom. However, in terms of what is considered a private act for the purposes of voyeurism, the CPS was arguing the opposite in the Richards appeal. The Court of Appeal clarified that consenting to sex in a private place does not amount to consent to be filmed without that person's knowledge. Anyone who films or photographs another person naked, without their permission, is breaking the law under sections 67 and 68 of the Sexual Offences Act.


title: Voyeurism

text: In the United States, video voyeurism is an offense in twelve states and may require the convicted person to register as a sex offender. The original case that led to the criminalisation of voyeurism has been made into a television movie called "Video Voyeur" and documents the criminalisation of secret photography. Criminal voyeurism statutes are related to invasion of privacy laws but are specific to unlawful surreptitious surveillance without consent and unlawful recordings including the broadcast, dissemination, publication, or selling of recordings involving places and times when a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy and a reasonable supposition they are not being photographed or filmed by "any mechanical, digital or electronic viewing device, camera or any other instrument capable of recording, storing or transmitting visual images that can be utilised to observe a person."


title: Voyeurism

text: Saudi Arabia banned the sale of camera phones nationwide in April 2004, but reversed the ban in December 2004. Some countries, such as South Korea and Japan, require all camera phones sold in their country to make a clearly audible sound whenever a picture is being taken.


title: Voyeurism

text: In 2013, the Indian Parliament made amendments to the Indian Penal Code, introducing voyeurism as a criminal offence. A man committing the offence of voyeurism would be liable for imprisonment not less than one year and which may extend up to three years for the first offence, and shall also be liable to fine and for any subsequent conviction would be liable for imprisonment for not less than three years and which may extend up to seven years and with fine.


title: Voyeurism

text: Voyeurism is generally deemed illegal in Singapore. It sentences technologically-enabled voyeurs to a maximum punishment of one year's jail and a fine under the context of insulting a woman's modesty. Recent cases in 2016 include the sentencing of church facility manager Kenneth Yeo Jia Chuan who filmed women in toilets by planting pinhole cameras in a handicapped toilet at the Church of Singapore at Bukit Timah, and in the unisex toilet of the church's office at Bukit Timah Shopping Centre.


title: Voyeurism

text: Secret photography by law enforcement authorities is called surveillance and is not considered to be voyeurism, though it may be unlawful or regulated in some countries.


title: Thomas Ian Griffith

text: Thomas Ian Griffith (born March 18, 1962) is an American actor and martial artist. He is best known for portraying Terry Silver in the 1989 film "The Karate Kid Part III", a role he reprised in the fourth and fifth seasons of the television series "Cobra Kai".


title: Thomas Ian Griffith

text: Griffith was born in Hartford, Connecticut, the son of Mary Ann (née O'Neil), who worked at a dance studio, and Thomas Joseph Griffith. Griffith attended South Catholic High School in Hartford. He then studied at the College of the Holy Cross where he was a dean's list student before leaving after his junior year to "make it" as an actor in New York.


title: Thomas Ian Griffith

text: Griffith became obsessed with Tae Kwon Do while in high school and earned a black belt when he was 18. His knowledge of Tae Kwon Do helped him land his first feature film: 1989's "The Karate Kid Part III", in which he played Terry Silver, a rival martial arts expert who influences Daniel LaRusso against his friend and mentor, Mr. Miyagi.


title: Thomas Ian Griffith

text: In 1996, Griffith starred in the film "Hollow Point" alongside Tia Carrere, as DEA agent Max Parish and FBI agent Diane Norwood respectively. Griffith has also collaborated with director John Carpenter. He played head vampire Jan Valek in the 1998 film "Vampires" and co-created the comic book series "Asylum", together with Carpenter and producer Sandy King.


title: Thomas Ian Griffith

text: His first TV role was on the soap opera "Another World", as Catlin Ewing, whom he played from 1984 to 1987. In 1999, he starred in the TV movie "Secret of Giving" with Reba McEntire; earlier in 1999, he had appeared in Reba's video for the song "What Do You Say". He also starred as Rock Hudson in a 1990 TV movie "Rock Hudson". He has made guest appearances on a number of television shows, including "In the Heat of the Night", "Wiseguy", and "One Tree Hill".


title: Thomas Ian Griffith

text: From 2013 to 2017, Griffith periodically wrote and worked as a story editor for the NBC television series "Grimm" and became a co-producer in 2015.


title: Thomas Ian Griffith

text: In 2021 and 2022, Griffith reprised the role of Terry Silver from "The Karate Kid Part III" in the fourth and fifth seasons of "Cobra Kai".


title: Thomas Ian Griffith

text: Griffith has been married to his former "Another World" costar Mary Page Keller since 1991, and has two sons. He holds a black belt in tae kwon do and kenpo karate.


title: Printed circuit board

text: A printed circuit board (PCB; also printed wiring board or PWB) is a medium used in electrical and electronic engineering to connect electronic components to one another in a controlled manner. It takes the form of a laminated sandwich structure of conductive and insulating layers: each of the conductive layers is designed with an artwork pattern of traces, planes and other features (similar to wires on a flat surface) etched from one or more sheet layers of copper laminated onto and/or between sheet layers of a non-conductive substrate. Electrical components may be fixed to conductive pads on the outer layers in the shape designed to accept the component's terminals, generally by means of soldering, to both electrically connect and mechanically fasten them to it. Another manufacturing process adds vias: plated-through holes that allow interconnections between layers.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Printed circuit boards are used in nearly all electronic products. Alternatives to PCBs include wire wrap and point-to-point construction, both once popular but now rarely used. PCBs require additional design effort to lay out the circuit, but manufacturing and assembly can be automated. Electronic design automation software is available to do much of the work of layout. Mass-producing circuits with PCBs is cheaper and faster than with other wiring methods, as components are mounted and wired in one operation. Large numbers of PCBs can be fabricated at the same time, and the layout has to be done only once. PCBs can also be made manually in small quantities, with reduced benefits.


title: Printed circuit board

text: PCBs can be single-sided (one copper layer), double-sided (two copper layers on both sides of one substrate layer), or multi-layer (outer and inner layers of copper, alternating with layers of substrate). Multi-layer PCBs allow for much higher component density, because circuit traces on the inner layers would otherwise take up surface space between components. The rise in popularity of multilayer PCBs with more than two, and especially with more than four, copper planes was concurrent with the adoption of surface mount technology. However, multilayer PCBs make repair, analysis, and field modification of circuits much more difficult and usually impractical.


title: Printed circuit board

text: The world market for bare PCBs exceeded $60.2 billion in 2014 and is estimated to reach $79 billion by 2024.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Before the development of printed circuit boards, electrical and electronic circuits were wired point-to-point on a chassis. Typically, the chassis was a sheet metal frame or pan, sometimes with a wooden bottom. Components were attached to the chassis, usually by insulators when the connecting point on the chassis was metal, and then their leads were connected directly or with jumper wires by soldering, or sometimes using crimp connectors, wire connector lugs on screw terminals, or other methods. Circuits were large, bulky, heavy, and relatively fragile (even discounting the breakable glass envelopes of the vacuum tubes that were often included in the circuits), and production was labor-intensive, so the products were expensive.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Development of the methods used in modern printed circuit boards started early in the 20th century. In 1903, a German inventor, Albert Hanson, described flat foil conductors laminated to an insulating board, in multiple layers. Thomas Edison experimented with chemical methods of plating conductors onto linen paper in 1904. Arthur Berry in 1913 patented a print-and-etch method in the UK, and in the United States Max Schoop obtained a patent to flame-spray metal onto a board through a patterned mask. Charles Ducas in 1925 patented a method of electroplating circuit patterns.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Predating the printed circuit invention, and similar in spirit, was John Sargrove's 1936–1947 Electronic Circuit Making Equipment (ECME) which sprayed metal onto a Bakelite plastic board. The ECME could produce three radio boards per minute.


title: Printed circuit board

text: The Austrian engineer Paul Eisler invented the printed circuit as part of a radio set while working in the UK around 1936. In 1941 a multi-layer printed circuit was used in German magnetic influence naval mines.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Around 1943 the USA began to use the technology on a large scale to make proximity fuzes for use in World War II. Such fuzes required an electronic circuit that could withstand being fired from a gun, and could be produced in quantity. The Centralab Division of Globe Union submitted a proposal which met the requirements: a ceramic plate would be screenprinted with metallic paint for conductors and carbon material for resistors, with ceramic disc capacitors and subminiature vacuum tubes soldered in place. The technique proved viable, and the resulting patent on the process, which was classified by the U.S. Army, was assigned to Globe Union. It was not until 1984 that the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) awarded Harry W. Rubinstein the Cledo Brunetti Award for early key contributions to the development of printed components and conductors on a common insulating substrate. Rubinstein was honored in 1984 by his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for his innovations in the technology of printed electronic circuits and the fabrication of capacitors. This invention also represents a step in the development of integrated circuit technology, as not only wiring but also passive components were fabricated on the ceramic substrate.


title: Printed circuit board

text: In 1948, the USA released the invention for commercial use. Printed circuits did not become commonplace in consumer electronics until the mid-1950s, after the "Auto-Sembly" process was developed by the United States Army. At around the same time in the UK work along similar lines was carried out by Geoffrey Dummer, then at the RRDE.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Motorola was an early leader in bringing the process into consumer electronics, announcing in August 1952 the adoption of "plated circuits" in home radios after six years of research and a $1M investment. Motorola soon began using its trademarked term for the process, PLAcir, in its consumer radio advertisements. Hallicrafters released its first "foto-etch" printed circuit product, a clock-radio, on 1 November 1952.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Even as circuit boards became available, the point-to-point chassis construction method remained in common use in industry (such as TV and hi-fi sets) into at least the late 1960s. Printed circuit boards were introduced to reduce the size, weight, and cost of parts of the circuitry. In 1960, a small consumer radio receiver might be built with all its circuitry on one circuit board, but a TV set would probably contain one or more circuit boards.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Originally, every electronic component had wire leads, and a PCB had holes drilled for each wire of each component. The component leads were then inserted through the holes and soldered to the copper PCB traces. This method of assembly is called "through-hole" construction. In 1949, Moe Abramson and Stanislaus F. Danko of the United States Army Signal Corps developed the "Auto-Sembly" process in which component leads were inserted into a copper foil interconnection pattern and dip soldered. The patent they obtained in 1956 was assigned to the U.S. Army. With the development of board lamination and etching techniques, this concept evolved into the standard printed circuit board fabrication process in use today. Soldering could be done automatically by passing the board over a ripple, or wave, of molten solder in a wave-soldering machine. However, the wires and holes are inefficient since drilling holes is expensive and consumes drill bits and the protruding wires are cut off and discarded.


title: Printed circuit board

text: From the 1980s onward, small surface mount parts have been used increasingly instead of through-hole components; this has led to smaller boards for a given functionality and lower production costs, but with some additional difficulty in servicing faulty boards.


title: Printed circuit board

text: In the 1990s the use of multilayer surface boards became more frequent. As a result, size was further minimized and both flexible and rigid PCBs were incorporated in different devices. In 1995 PCB manufacturers began using microvia technology to produce High-Density Interconnect (HDI) PCBs.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Recent advances in 3D printing have meant that there are several new techniques in PCB creation. 3D printed electronics (PEs) can be utilized to print items layer by layer and subsequently the item can be printed with a liquid ink that contains electronic functionalities.


title: Printed circuit board

text: HDI (High Density Interconnect) technology allows for a denser design on the PCB and thus potentially smaller PCBs with more traces and/or components in a given area. As a result, the paths between components can be shorter. HDIs use blind/buried vias, or a combination that includes microvias. With multi-layer HDI PCBs the interconnection of several vias stacked on top of each other (stacked vías, instead of one deep buried via) can be made stronger, thus enhancing reliability in all conditions. The most common applications for HDI technology are computer and mobile phone components as well as medical equipment and military communication equipment. A 4-layer HDI microvia PCB is equivalent in quality to an 8-layer through-hole PCB, so HDI technology can reduce costs.


title: Printed circuit board

text: A basic PCB consists of a flat sheet of insulating material and a layer of copper foil, laminated to the substrate. Chemical etching divides the copper into separate conducting lines called tracks or "circuit traces", pads for connections, vias to pass connections between layers of copper, and features such as solid conductive areas for electromagnetic shielding or other purposes. The tracks function as wires fixed in place, and are insulated from each other by air and the board substrate material. The surface of a PCB may have a coating that protects the copper from corrosion and reduces the chances of solder shorts between traces or undesired electrical contact with stray bare wires. For its function in helping to prevent solder shorts, the coating is called solder resist or solder mask.


title: Printed circuit board

text: The pattern to be etched into each copper layer of a PCB is called the "artwork". The etching is usually done using photoresist which is coated onto the PCB, then exposed to light projected in the pattern of the artwork. The resist material protects the copper from dissolution into the etching solution. The etched board is then cleaned. A PCB design can be mass-reproduced in a way similar to the way photographs can be mass-duplicated from film negatives using a photographic printer.


title: Printed circuit board

text: FR-4 glass epoxy is the most common insulating substrate. Another substrate material is cotton paper impregnated with phenolic resin, often tan or brown.


title: Printed circuit board

text: When a PCB has no components installed, it is less ambiguously called a "printed wiring board" ("PWB") or "etched wiring board". However, the term "printed wiring board" has fallen into disuse. A PCB populated with electronic components is called a "printed circuit assembly" ("PCA"), "printed circuit board assembly" or "PCB assembly" ("PCBA"). In informal usage, the term "printed circuit board" most commonly means "printed circuit assembly" (with components). The IPC preferred term for an assembled board is "circuit card assembly" ("CCA"), and for an assembled backplane it is "backplane assembly". "Card" is another widely used informal term for a "printed circuit assembly".


title: Printed circuit board

text: A PCB may be printed with a legend identifying the components, test points, or identifying text. Originally, silkscreen printing was used for this purpose, but today other, finer quality printing methods are usually used. Normally the legend does not affect the function of a PCBA.


title: Printed circuit board

text: A printed circuit board can have multiple layers of copper which almost always are arranged in pairs. The number of layers and the interconnection designed between them (vias, PTHs) provide a general estimate of the board complexity. Using more layers allow for more routing options and better control of signal integrity, but are also time consuming and costly to manufacture. Likewise, selection of the vias for the board also allow fine tuning of the board size, escaping of signals off complex ICs, routing, and long term reliability, but are tightly coupled with production complexity and cost.


title: Printed circuit board

text: One of the simplest boards to produce is the two-layer board. It has copper on both sides that are referred to as external layers; multi layer boards sandwich additional internal layers of copper and insulation. After two-layer PCBs, the next step up is the four-layer. The four layer board adds significantly more routing options in the internal layers as compared to the two layer board, and often some portion of the internal layers is used as ground plane or power plane, to achieve better signal integrity, higher signaling frequencies, lower EMI, and better power supply decoupling.


title: Printed circuit board

text: In multi-layer boards, the layers of material are laminated together in an alternating sandwich: copper, substrate, copper, substrate, copper, etc.; each plane of copper is etched, and any internal vias (that will not extend to both outer surfaces of the finished multilayer board) are plated-through, before the layers are laminated together. Only the outer layers need be coated; the inner copper layers are protected by the adjacent substrate layers.


title: Printed circuit board

text: "Through hole" components are mounted by their wire leads passing through the board and soldered to traces on the other side. "Surface mount" components are attached by their leads to copper traces on the same side of the board. A board may use both methods for mounting components. PCBs with only through-hole mounted components are now uncommon. Surface mounting is used for transistors, diodes, IC chips, resistors, and capacitors. Through-hole mounting may be used for some large components such as electrolytic capacitors and connectors.


title: Printed circuit board

text: The first PCBs used through-hole technology, mounting electronic components by leads inserted through holes on one side of the board and soldered onto copper traces on the other side. Boards may be single-sided, with an unplated component side, or more compact double-sided boards, with components soldered on both sides. Horizontal installation of through-hole parts with two axial leads (such as resistors, capacitors, and diodes) is done by bending the leads 90 degrees in the same direction, inserting the part in the board (often bending leads located on the back of the board in opposite directions to improve the part's mechanical strength), soldering the leads, and trimming off the ends. Leads may be soldered either manually or by a wave soldering machine. Through-hole manufacture adds to board cost by requiring many holes to be drilled accurately, and it limits the available routing area for signal traces on layers immediately below the top layer on multi-layer boards, since the holes must pass through all layers to the opposite side. Once surface-mounting came into use, small-sized SMD components were used where possible, with through-hole mounting only of components unsuitably large for surface-mounting due to power requirements or mechanical limitations, or subject to mechanical stress which might damage the PCB (e.g. by lifting the copper off the board surface).


title: Printed circuit board

text: Surface-mount technology emerged in the 1960s, gained momentum in the early 1980s, and became widely used by the mid-1990s.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Components were mechanically redesigned to have small metal tabs or end caps that could be soldered directly onto the PCB surface, instead of wire leads to pass through holes. Components became much smaller and component placement on both sides of the board became more common than with through-hole mounting, allowing much smaller PCB assemblies with much higher circuit densities.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Surface mounting lends itself well to a high degree of automation, reducing labor costs and greatly increasing production rates compared with through-hole circuit boards. Components can be supplied mounted on carrier tapes. Surface mount components can be about one-quarter to one-tenth of the size and weight of through-hole components, and passive components much cheaper. However, prices of semiconductor surface mount devices (SMDs) are determined more by the chip itself than the package, with little price advantage over larger packages, and some wire-ended components, such as 1N4148 small-signal switch diodes, are actually significantly cheaper than SMD equivalents.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Each trace consists of a flat, narrow part of the copper foil that remains after etching. Its resistance, determined by its width, thickness, and length, must be sufficiently low for the current the conductor will carry. Power and ground traces may need to be wider than signal traces. In a multi-layer board one entire layer may be mostly solid copper to act as a ground plane for shielding and power return. For microwave circuits, transmission lines can be laid out in a planar form such as stripline or microstrip with carefully controlled dimensions to assure a consistent impedance. In radio-frequency and fast switching circuits the inductance and capacitance of the printed circuit board conductors become significant circuit elements, usually undesired; conversely, they can be used as a deliberate part of the circuit design, as in distributed-element filters, antennae, and fuses, obviating the need for additional discrete components. High density interconnects (HDI) PCBs have tracks and/or vias with a width or diameter of under 152 micrometers.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Laminates are manufactured by curing under pressure and temperature layers of cloth or paper with thermoset resin to form an integral final piece of uniform thickness. The size can be up to in width and length. Varying cloth weaves (threads per inch or cm), cloth thickness, and resin percentage are used to achieve the desired final thickness and dielectric characteristics. Available standard laminate thickness are listed in


title: Printed circuit board

text: The cloth or fiber material used, resin material, and the cloth to resin ratio determine the laminate's type designation (FR-4, CEM-1, G-10, etc.) and therefore the characteristics of the laminate produced. Important characteristics are the level to which the laminate is fire retardant, the dielectric constant (e), the loss tangent (tan δ), the tensile strength, the shear strength, the glass transition temperature (T), and the Z-axis expansion coefficient (how much the thickness changes with temperature).


title: Printed circuit board

text: There are quite a few different dielectrics that can be chosen to provide different insulating values depending on the requirements of the circuit. Some of these dielectrics are polytetrafluoroethylene (Teflon), FR-4, FR-1, CEM-1 or CEM-3. Well known pre-preg materials used in the PCB industry are FR-2 (phenolic cotton paper), FR-3 (cotton paper and epoxy), FR-4 (woven glass and epoxy), FR-5 (woven glass and epoxy), FR-6 (matte glass and polyester), G-10 (woven glass and epoxy), CEM-1 (cotton paper and epoxy), CEM-2 (cotton paper and epoxy), CEM-3 (non-woven glass and epoxy), CEM-4 (woven glass and epoxy), CEM-5 (woven glass and polyester). Thermal expansion is an important consideration especially with ball grid array (BGA) and naked die technologies, and glass fiber offers the best dimensional stability.


title: Printed circuit board

text: FR-4 is by far the most common material used today. The board stock with unetched copper on it is called "copper-clad laminate".


title: Printed circuit board

text: With decreasing size of board features and increasing frequencies, small nonhomogeneities like uneven distribution of fiberglass or other filler, thickness variations, and bubbles in the resin matrix, and the associated local variations in the dielectric constant, are gaining importance.


title: Printed circuit board

text: The circuitboard substrates are usually dielectric composite materials. The composites contain a matrix (usually an epoxy resin) and a reinforcement (usually a woven, sometimes nonwoven, glass fibers, sometimes even paper), and in some cases a filler is added to the resin (e.g. ceramics; titanate ceramics can be used to increase the dielectric constant).


title: Printed circuit board

text: The reinforcement type defines two major classes of materials: woven and non-woven. Woven reinforcements are cheaper, but the high dielectric constant of glass may not be favorable for many higher-frequency applications. The spatially nonhomogeneous structure also introduces local variations in electrical parameters, due to different resin/glass ratio at different areas of the weave pattern. Nonwoven reinforcements, or materials with low or no reinforcement, are more expensive but more suitable for some RF/analog applications.


title: Printed circuit board

text: The substrates are characterized by several key parameters, chiefly thermomechanical (glass transition temperature, tensile strength, shear strength, thermal expansion), electrical (dielectric constant, loss tangent, dielectric breakdown voltage, leakage current, tracking resistance...), and others (e.g. moisture absorption).


title: Printed circuit board

text: At the glass transition temperature the resin in the composite softens and significantly increases thermal expansion; exceeding T then exerts mechanical overload on the board components - e.g. the joints and the vias. Below T the thermal expansion of the resin roughly matches copper and glass, above it gets significantly higher. As the reinforcement and copper confine the board along the plane, virtually all volume expansion projects to the thickness and stresses the plated-through holes. Repeated soldering or other exposition to higher temperatures can cause failure of the plating, especially with thicker boards; thick boards therefore require a matrix with a high T.


title: Printed circuit board

text: The materials used determine the substrate's dielectric constant. This constant is also dependent on frequency, usually decreasing with frequency. As this constant determines the signal propagation speed, frequency dependence introduces phase distortion in wideband applications; as flat a dielectric constant vs frequency characteristics as is achievable is important here. The impedance of transmission lines decreases with frequency, therefore faster edges of signals reflect more than slower ones.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Dielectric breakdown voltage determines the maximum voltage gradient the material can be subjected to before suffering a breakdown (conduction, or arcing, through the dielectric).


title: Printed circuit board

text: Tracking resistance determines how the material resists high voltage electrical discharges creeping over the board surface.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Loss tangent determines how much of the electromagnetic energy from the signals in the conductors is absorbed in the board material. This factor is important for high frequencies. Low-loss materials are more expensive. Choosing unnecessarily low-loss material is a common engineering error in high-frequency digital design; it increases the cost of the boards without a corresponding benefit. Signal degradation by loss tangent and dielectric constant can be easily assessed by an eye pattern.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Moisture absorption occurs when the material is exposed to high humidity or water. Both the resin and the reinforcement may absorb water; water also may be soaked by capillary forces through voids in the materials and along the reinforcement. Epoxies of the FR-4 materials are not too susceptible, with absorption of only 0.15%. Teflon has very low absorption of 0.01%. Polyimides and cyanate esters, on the other side, suffer from high water absorption. Absorbed water can lead to significant degradation of key parameters; it impairs tracking resistance, breakdown voltage, and dielectric parameters. Relative dielectric constant of water is about 73, compared to about 4 for common circuit board materials. Absorbed moisture can also vaporize on heating, as during soldering, and cause cracking and delamination, the same effect responsible for "popcorning" damage on wet packaging of electronic parts. Careful baking of the substrates may be required to dry them prior to soldering.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Copper thickness of PCBs can be specified directly or as the weight of copper per area (in ounce per square foot) which is easier to measure. One ounce per square foot is 1.344 mils or 34 micrometers thickness. "Heavy copper" is a layer exceeding three ounces of copper per ft, or approximately 0.0042 inches (4.2 mils, 105 μm) thick. Heavy copper layers are used for high current or to help dissipate heat.


title: Printed circuit board

text: On the common FR-4 substrates, 1 oz copper per ft (35 µm) is the most common thickness; 2 oz (70 µm) and 0.5 oz (17.5 µm) thickness is often an option. Less common are 12 and 105 µm, 9 µm is sometimes available on some substrates. Flexible substrates typically have thinner metalization. Metal-core boards for high power devices commonly use thicker copper; 35 µm is usual but also 140 and 400 µm can be encountered.


title: Printed circuit board

text: In the USA, copper foil thickness is specified in units of ounces per square foot (oz/ft), commonly referred to simply as "ounce". Common thicknesses are 1/2 oz/ft (150 g/m), 1 oz/ft (300 g/m), 2 oz/ft (600 g/m), and 3 oz/ft (900 g/m). These work out to thicknesses of 17.05 μm (0.67 thou), 34.1 μm (1.34 thou), 68.2 μm (2.68 thou), and 102.3 μm (4.02 thou), respectively. 1/2 oz/ft foil is not widely used as a finished copper weight, but is used for outer layers when plating for through holes will increase the finished copper weight Some PCB manufacturers refer to 1 oz/ft copper foil as having a thickness of 35 μm (may also be referred to as 35 μ, 35 micron, or 35 mic).


title: Printed circuit board

text: Manufacturing starts from the fabrication data generated by computer aided design, and component information. The fabrication data is read into the CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing) software. CAM performs the following functions:


title: Printed circuit board

text: Initially PCBs were designed manually by creating a photomask on a clear mylar sheet, usually at two or four times the true size. Starting from the schematic diagram the component pin pads were laid out on the mylar and then traces were routed to connect the pads. Rub-on dry transfers of common component footprints increased efficiency. Traces were made with self-adhesive tape. Pre-printed non-reproducing grids on the mylar assisted in layout. The finished photomask was photolithographically reproduced onto a photoresist coating on the blank copper-clad boards.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Several small printed circuit boards can be grouped together for processing as a panel. A panel consisting of a design duplicated "n"-times is also called an "n"-panel, whereas a "multi-panel" combines several different designs onto a single panel. The outer tooling strip often includes tooling holes, a set of panel fiducials, a test coupon, and may include hatched copper pour or similar patterns for even copper distribution over the whole panel in order to avoid bending. The assemblers often mount components on panels rather than single PCBs because this is efficient. Panelization may also be necessary for boards with components placed near an edge of the board because otherwise the board could not be mounted during assembly. Most assembly shops require a free area of at least 10 mm around the board.


title: Printed circuit board

text: The panel is eventually broken into individual PCBs along perforations or grooves in the panel through milling or cutting. For milled panels a common distance between the individual boards is 2–3 mm. Today depaneling is often done by lasers which cut the board with no contact. Laser depaneling reduces stress on the fragile circuits, improving the yield of defect-free units.


title: Printed circuit board

text: The first step is to replicate the pattern in the fabricator's CAM system on a protective mask on the copper foil PCB layers. Subsequent etching removes the unwanted copper unprotected by the mask. (Alternatively, a conductive ink can be ink-jetted on a blank (non-conductive) board. This technique is also used in the manufacture of hybrid circuits.)


title: Printed circuit board

text: The process by which copper traces are applied to the surface is known as "etching" after the subtractive method of the process, though there are also additive and semi-additive methods.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Subtractive methods remove copper from an entirely copper-coated board to leave only the desired copper pattern. The simplest method, used for small-scale production and often by hobbyists, is immersion etching, in which the board is submerged in etching solution such as ferric chloride. Compared with methods used for mass production, the etching time is long. Heat and agitation can be applied to the bath to speed the etching rate. In bubble etching, air is passed through the etchant bath to agitate the solution and speed up etching. Splash etching uses a motor-driven paddle to splash boards with etchant; the process has become commercially obsolete since it is not as fast as spray etching. In spray etching, the etchant solution is distributed over the boards by nozzles, and recirculated by pumps. Adjustment of the nozzle pattern, flow rate, temperature, and etchant composition gives predictable control of etching rates and high production rates. As more copper is consumed from the boards, the etchant becomes saturated and less effective; different etchants have different capacities for copper, with some as high as 150 grams of copper per litre of solution. In commercial use, etchants can be regenerated to restore their activity, and the dissolved copper recovered and sold. Small-scale etching requires attention to disposal of used etchant, which is corrosive and toxic due to its metal content. The etchant removes copper on all surfaces not protected by the resist. "Undercut" occurs when etchant attacks the thin edge of copper under the resist; this can reduce conductor widths and cause open-circuits. Careful control of etch time is required to prevent undercut. Where metallic plating is used as a resist, it can "overhang" which can cause short-circuits between adjacent traces when closely spaced. Overhang can be removed by wire-brushing the board after etching.


title: Printed circuit board

text: In additive methods the pattern is electroplated onto a bare substrate using a complex process. The advantage of the additive method is that less material is needed and less waste is produced. In the full additive process the bare laminate is covered with a photosensitive film which is imaged (exposed to light through a mask and then developed which removes the unexposed film). The exposed areas are sensitized in a chemical bath, usually containing palladium and similar to that used for through hole plating which makes the exposed area capable of bonding metal ions. The laminate is then plated with copper in the sensitized areas. When the mask is stripped, the PCB is finished.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Semi-additive is the most common process: The unpatterned board has a thin layer of copper already on it. A reverse mask is then applied. (Unlike a subtractive process mask, this mask exposes those parts of the substrate that will eventually become the traces.) Additional copper is then plated onto the board in the unmasked areas; copper may be plated to any desired weight. Tin-lead or other surface platings are then applied. The mask is stripped away and a brief etching step removes the now-exposed bare original copper laminate from the board, isolating the individual traces. Some single-sided boards which have plated-through holes are made in this way. General Electric made consumer radio sets in the late 1960s using additive boards. The (semi-)additive process is commonly used for multi-layer boards as it facilitates the plating-through of the holes to produce conductive vias in the circuit board.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Industrial etching is usually done with ammonium persulfate or ferric chloride. For PTH (plated-through holes), additional steps of electroless deposition are done after the holes are drilled, then copper is electroplated to build up the thickness, the boards are screened, and plated with tin/lead. The tin/lead becomes the resist leaving the bare copper to be etched away.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Multi-layer printed circuit boards have trace layers inside the board. This is achieved by laminating a stack of materials in a press by applying pressure and heat for a period of time. This results in an inseparable one piece product. For example, a four-layer PCB can be fabricated by starting from a two-sided copper-clad laminate, etch the circuitry on both sides, then laminate to the top and bottom pre-preg and copper foil. It is then drilled, plated, and etched again to get traces on top and bottom layers.


title: Printed circuit board

text: The inner layers are given a complete machine inspection before lamination because mistakes cannot be corrected afterwards. Automatic optical inspection (AOI) machines compare an image of the board with the digital image generated from the original design data. Automated Optical Shaping (AOS) machines can then add missing copper or remove excess copper using a laser, reducing the number of PCBs that have to be discarded. PCB tracks can have a width of just 10 micrometers.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Holes through a PCB are typically drilled with drill bits made of solid coated tungsten carbide. Coated tungsten carbide is used because board materials are abrasive. High-speed-steel bits would dull quickly, tearing the copper and ruining the board. Drilling is done by computer-controlled drilling machines, using a "drill file" or Excellon file that describes the location and size of each drilled hole.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Holes may be made conductive, by electroplating or inserting hollow metal eyelets, to connect board layers. Some conductive holes are intended for the insertion of through-hole-component leads. Others used to connect board layers, are called vias.


title: Printed circuit board

text: When vias with a diameter smaller than 76.2 micrometers are required, drilling with mechanical bits is impossible because of high rates of wear and breakage. In this case, the vias may be laser drilled—evaporated by lasers. Laser-drilled vias typically have an inferior surface finish inside the hole. These holes are called "micro vias" and can have diameters as small as 10 micrometers. It is also possible with "controlled-depth" drilling, laser drilling, or by pre-drilling the individual sheets of the PCB before lamination, to produce holes that connect only some of the copper layers, rather than passing through the entire board. These holes are called "blind vias" when they connect an internal copper layer to an outer layer, or "buried vias" when they connect two or more internal copper layers and no outer layers. Laser drilling machines can drill thousands of holes per second and can use either UV or lasers.


title: Printed circuit board

text: The hole walls for boards with two or more layers can be made conductive and then electroplated with copper to form "plated-through holes". These holes electrically connect the conducting layers of the PCB. For multi-layer boards, those with three layers or more, drilling typically produces a "smear" of the high temperature decomposition products of bonding agent in the laminate system. Before the holes can be plated through, this smear must be removed by a chemical "de-smear" process, or by "plasma-etch". The de-smear process ensures that a good connection is made to the copper layers when the hole is plated through. On high reliability boards a process called etch-back is performed chemically with a potassium permanganate based etchant or plasma etching. The etch-back removes resin and the glass fibers so that the copper layers extend into the hole and as the hole is plated become integral with the deposited copper.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Proper plating or surface finish selection can be critical to process yield, the amount of rework, field failure rate, and reliability.


title: Printed circuit board

text: After PCBs are etched and then rinsed with water, the solder mask is applied, and then any exposed copper is coated with solder, nickel/gold, or some other anti-corrosion coating.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Matte solder is usually fused to provide a better bonding surface for bare copper. Treatments, such as benzimidazolethiol, prevent surface oxidation of bare copper. The places to which components will be mounted are typically plated, because untreated bare copper oxidizes quickly, and therefore is not readily solderable. Traditionally, any exposed copper was coated with solder by hot air (solder) levelling (HASL aka HAL). The HASL finish prevents oxidation from the underlying copper, thereby guaranteeing a solderable surface. This solder was a tin-lead alloy, however new solder compounds are now used to achieve compliance with the RoHS directive in the EU, which restricts the use of lead. One of these lead-free compounds is SN100CL, made up of 99.3% tin, 0.7% copper, 0.05% nickel, and a nominal of 60 ppm germanium.


title: Printed circuit board

text: It is important to use solder compatible with both the PCB and the parts used. An example is ball grid array (BGA) using tin-lead solder balls for connections losing their balls on bare copper traces or using lead-free solder paste.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Other platings used are organic solderability preservative (OSP), immersion silver (IAg), immersion tin (ISn), electroless nickel immersion gold (ENIG) coating, electroless nickel electroless palladium immersion gold (ENEPIG), and direct gold plating (over nickel). Edge connectors, placed along one edge of some boards, are often nickel-plated then gold-plated using ENIG. Another coating consideration is rapid diffusion of coating metal into tin solder. Tin forms intermetallics such as CuSn and AgCu that dissolve into the Tin liquidus or solidus (at 50 °C), stripping surface coating or leaving voids.


title: Printed circuit board

text: "Electrochemical migration" (ECM) is the growth of conductive metal filaments on or in a printed circuit board (PCB) under the influence of a DC voltage bias. Silver, zinc, and aluminum are known to grow whiskers under the influence of an electric field. Silver also grows conducting surface paths in the presence of halide and other ions, making it a poor choice for electronics use. Tin will grow "whiskers" due to tension in the plated surface. Tin-lead or solder plating also grows whiskers, only reduced by reducing the percentage of tin. Reflow to melt solder or tin plate to relieve surface stress lowers whisker incidence. Another coating issue is tin pest, the transformation of tin to a powdery allotrope at low temperature.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Areas that should not be soldered may be covered with solder resist (solder mask). The solder mask is what gives PCBs their characteristic green color, although it is also available in several other colors, such as red, blue, purple, yellow, black and white. One of the most common solder resists used today is called "LPI" (liquid photoimageable solder mask).  A photo-sensitive coating is applied to the surface of the PWB, then exposed to light through the solder mask image film, and finally developed where the unexposed areas are washed away. Dry film solder mask is similar to the dry film used to image the PWB for plating or etching. After being laminated to the PWB surface it is imaged and developed as LPI. Once but no longer commonly used, because of its low accuracy and resolution, is to screen print epoxy ink. In addition to repelling solder, solder resist also provides protection from the environment to the copper that would otherwise be exposed.


title: Printed circuit board

text: A legend (also known as "silk" or "silkscreen") is often printed on one or both sides of the PCB. It contains the component designators, switch settings, test points and other indications helpful in assembling, testing, servicing, and sometimes using the circuit board.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Boards with no components installed are usually "bare-board tested" for "shorts" and "opens". This is called "electrical test" or "PCB e-test". A short is a connection between two points that should not be connected. An open is a missing connection between points that should be connected. For high-volume production, a fixture such as a "bed of nails" in a rigid needle adapter makes contact with copper lands on the board. The fixture or adapter is a significant fixed cost and this method is only economical for high-volume or high-value production. For small or medium volume production "flying probe" testers are used where test probes are moved over the board by an XY drive to make contact with the copper lands. There is no need for a fixture and hence the fixed costs are much lower. The CAM system "instructs" the electrical tester to apply a voltage to each contact point as required and to check that this voltage appears on the appropriate contact points and only on these.


title: Printed circuit board

text: In assembly the bare board is populated (or "stuffed") with electronic components to form a functional "printed circuit assembly" (PCA), sometimes called a "printed circuit board assembly" (PCBA). In through-hole technology, the component leads are inserted in holes surrounded by conductive "pads"; the holes keep the components in place. In surface-mount technology (SMT), the component is placed on the PCB so that the pins line up with the conductive "pads" or "lands" on the surfaces of the PCB; solder paste, which was previously applied to the pads, holds the components in place temporarily; if surface-mount components are applied to both sides of the board, the bottom-side components are glued to the board. In both through hole and surface mount, the components are then soldered; once cooled and solidified, the solder holds the components in place permanently and electrically connects them to the board.


title: Printed circuit board

text: There are a variety of soldering techniques used to attach components to a PCB. High volume production is usually done with a pick-and-place machine and bulk wave soldering for through-hole parts or reflow ovens for SMT components and/or through-hole parts, but skilled technicians are able to hand-solder very tiny parts (for instance 0201 packages which are 0.02 in. by 0.01 in.) under a microscope, using tweezers and a fine-tip soldering iron, for small volume prototypes. Selective soldering may be used for delicate parts. Some SMT parts cannot be soldered by hand, such as BGA packages. All through-hole components can be hand soldered, making them favored for prototyping where size, weight, and the use of the exact components that would be used in high volume production are not concerns.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Often, through-hole and surface-mount construction must be combined in a single assembly because some required components are available only in surface-mount packages, while others are available only in through-hole packages. Or, even if all components are available in through-hole packages, it might be desired to take advantage of the size, weight, and cost reductions obtainable by using some available surface-mount devices. Another reason to use both methods is that through-hole mounting can provide needed strength for components likely to endure physical stress (such as connectors that are frequently mated and demated or that connect to cables expected to impart substantial stress to the PCB-and-connector interface), while components that are expected to go untouched will take up less space using surface-mount techniques. "For further comparison, see the SMT page."


title: Printed circuit board

text: To facilitate these tests, PCBs may be designed with extra pads to make temporary connections. Sometimes these pads must be isolated with resistors. The in-circuit test may also exercise boundary scan test features of some components. In-circuit test systems may also be used to program nonvolatile memory components on the board.


title: Printed circuit board

text: In boundary scan testing, test circuits integrated into various ICs on the board form temporary connections between the PCB traces to test that the ICs are mounted correctly. Boundary scan testing requires that all the ICs to be tested use a standard test configuration procedure, the most common one being the Joint Test Action Group (JTAG) standard. The JTAG test architecture provides a means to test interconnects between integrated circuits on a board without using physical test probes, by using circuitry in the ICs to employ the IC pins themselves as test probes. JTAG tool vendors provide various types of stimuli and sophisticated algorithms, not only to detect the failing nets, but also to isolate the faults to specific nets, devices, and pins.


title: Printed circuit board

text: When boards fail the test, technicians may desolder and replace failed components, a task known as "rework".


title: Printed circuit board

text: PCBs intended for extreme environments often have a conformal coating, which is applied by dipping or spraying after the components have been soldered. The coat prevents corrosion and leakage currents or shorting due to condensation. The earliest conformal coats were wax; modern conformal coats are usually dips of dilute solutions of silicone rubber, polyurethane, acrylic, or epoxy. Another technique for applying a conformal coating is for plastic to be sputtered onto the PCB in a vacuum chamber. The chief disadvantage of conformal coatings is that servicing of the board is rendered extremely difficult.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Many assembled PCBs are static sensitive, and therefore they must be placed in antistatic bags during transport. When handling these boards, the user must be grounded (earthed). Improper handling techniques might transmit an accumulated static charge through the board, damaging or destroying components. The damage might not immediately affect function but might lead to early failure later on, cause intermittent operating faults, or cause a narrowing of the range of environmental and electrical conditions under which the board functions properly. Even bare boards are sometimes static sensitive: traces have become so fine that it is possible to blow a trace (or change its characteristics) with a static discharge. This is especially true on non-traditional PCBs such as MCMs and microwave PCBs.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Cordwood construction can save significant space and was often used with wire-ended components in applications where space was at a premium (such as fuzes, missile guidance, and telemetry systems) and in high-speed computers, where short traces were important. In cordwood construction, axial-leaded components were mounted between two parallel planes. The components were either soldered together with jumper wire or they were connected to other components by thin nickel ribbon welded at right angles onto the component leads. To avoid shorting together different interconnection layers, thin insulating cards were placed between them. Perforations or holes in the cards allowed component leads to project through to the next interconnection layer. One disadvantage of this system was that special nickel-leaded components had to be used to allow reliable interconnecting welds to be made. Differential thermal expansion of the component could put pressure on the leads of the components and the PCB traces and cause mechanical damage (as was seen in several modules on the Apollo program). Additionally, components located in the interior are difficult to replace. Some versions of cordwood construction used soldered single-sided PCBs as the interconnection method (as pictured), allowing the use of normal-leaded components at the cost of being difficult to remove the boards or replace any component that is not at the edge.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Before the advent of integrated circuits, this method allowed the highest possible component packing density; because of this, it was used by a number of computer vendors including Control Data Corporation. The cordwood method of construction was used only rarely once PCBs became widespread, mainly in aerospace or other extremely high-density electronics.


title: Printed circuit board

text: A minimal PCB for a single component, used for prototyping, is called a breakout board. The purpose of a breakout board is to "break out" the leads of a component on separate terminals so that manual connections to them can be made easily. Breakout boards are especially used for surface-mount components or any components with fine lead pitch.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Advanced PCBs may contain components embedded in the substrate, such as capacitors and integrated circuits, to reduce the amount of space taken up by components on the surface of the PCB while improving electrical characteristics.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Multiwire is a patented technique of interconnection which uses machine-routed insulated wires embedded in a non-conducting matrix (often plastic resin). It was used during the 1980s and 1990s. As of 2010, Multiwire was still available through Hitachi.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Since it was quite easy to stack interconnections (wires) inside the embedding matrix, the approach allowed designers to forget completely about the routing of wires (usually a time-consuming operation of PCB design): Anywhere the designer needs a connection, the machine will draw a wire in a straight line from one location/pin to another. This led to very short design times (no complex algorithms to use even for high density designs) as well as reduced crosstalk (which is worse when wires run parallel to each other—which almost never happens in Multiwire), though the cost is too high to compete with cheaper PCB technologies when large quantities are needed.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Printed circuit boards have been used as an alternative to their typical use for electronic and biomedical engineering thanks to the versatility of their layers, especially the copper layer. PCB layers have been used to fabricate sensors, such as capacitive pressure sensors and accelerometers, actuators such as microvalves and microheaters, as well as platforms of sensors and actuators for Lab-on-a-chip (LoC), for example to perform polymerase chain reaction (PCR), and fuel cells, to name a few.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Manufacturers may not support component-level repair of printed circuit boards because of the relatively low cost to replace compared with the time and cost of troubleshooting to a component level. In board-level repair, the technician identifies the board (PCA) on which the fault resides and replaces it. This shift is economically efficient from a manufacturer's point of view but is also materially wasteful, as a circuit board with hundreds of functional components may be discarded and replaced due to the failure of one minor and inexpensive part, such as a resistor or capacitor. This practice is a significant contributor to the problem of e-waste.


title: Printed circuit board

text: In many countries (including all European Single Market participants, the United Kingdom, Turkey, and China), legislation restricts the use of lead, cadmium and mercury in electrical equipment. PCBs sold in such countries must therefore use lead-free manufacturing processes and lead-free solder, and attached components must themselves be compliant.


title: Printed circuit board

text: Safety Standard UL 796 covers component safety requirements for printed wiring boards for use as components in devices or appliances. Testing analyzes characteristics such as flammability, maximum operating temperature, electrical tracking, heat deflection, and direct support of live electrical parts.


title: Murder of Cassie Jo Stoddart

text: The murder of Cassie Jo Stoddart took place in Bannock County, Idaho, United States, on September 22, 2006, when Stoddart (born December 21, 1989), a student at Pocatello High School, was stabbed to death by classmates Brian Lee Draper (born March 21, 1990) and Torey Michael Adamcik (born June 14, 1990). Both perpetrators received sentences of life imprisonment without parole on August 21, 2007.


title: Murder of Cassie Jo Stoddart

text: After spending most of his childhood in Utah, Brian Draper moved with his family to Pocatello, Idaho. He met Torey Adamcik when they were both students at Pocatello High School. Both boys were interested in films and started recording on their own. The victim, Cassie Jo Stoddart, also attended the same school; she and both killers were juniors.


title: Murder of Cassie Jo Stoddart

text: On the night of September 22, 2006, Stoddart was house sitting for her aunt and uncle, Allison and Frank Contreras, on Whispering Cliffs Drive in northeast Bannock County. The Contreras family were out of town and had hired Stoddart to come take care of their three cats and two dogs for the weekend. Stoddart was visited that evening by her boyfriend, Matt Beckham, who arrived around 6:00 p.m. Later, classmates Brian Draper and Torey Adamcik, who were both aged 16 at the time, came over to the house to "hang out". Stoddart gave the friends a tour of the house, including the basement. The four teens went into the living room to watch the film "Kill Bill, Volume II", but Adamcik and Draper ended up leaving before the film ended, saying they "wanted to watch a movie at their local movie theater instead." Stoddart and Beckham stayed behind.