What Are the Parts of a Circuit Board?

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name's Dave Andrews. Today, I'm going to talk to you about the parts of a circuit board. Let's go to our computer where I have a couple of pictures to show you. The first one here is a...what's called a printed circuit board or a PCB. Now, you're going to find a printed circuit board in pretty much every electronic device that you ever use. If you drive in any modern vehicle, there's actually a computer chip that is a printed circuit board that controls the various parts of that vehicle. Now, a printed circuit board relies on some kind of a solid medium. It's usually going to be sort of a silicon type of thing, which is why they call it a silicon chip, that is a hard board type of thing. And inside of this board are going to be printed, basically, metallic connections. You know, they're not really wires, per se, but they are basically printed conductive materials that transmit electricity from one spot to another. Like as you can you see here, there's a...there's a connection here. It runs along this printed little conductor right here to get to whatever end point that it's going to. And that's how a circuit board transmits electricity. As you'll notice, none of these touch so you don't have any kind of short circuiting or anything like that. And it is these printed connections on the board that will transmit electricity from one point to another. Now, this is a very common circuit board that you'll use. This is actually called a motherboard, and you see it in pretty much every computer that you ever use. Now, it's very complex. As you can see, there's so many connections here -- they almost look white when you're looking at them. But everything ties into this processor device here that's under this fan. Now, a motherboard has a processor on it that controls all of the actions on that motherboard, which is why you see the most activity on this board around the processor. Now, there are multiple chips on this board right here, and all these connections go between chips which are, themselves, just smaller circuit boards that are attached to the main circuit board and they connect these chips together. So a chip is another major part of a circuit board and the connections between those chips are the printed part of it. So that's basically just a quick overview of the components of a circuit board. My name's Dave Andrews, and I've just talked to you a little bit about the components of a circuit board."