Before assembling a CAT Board with the new 0.2 PCBs from PCBCart, I thought I'd compare them to the previous 0.1 version from PCBWay.

At a macro-level, they both look like circuit boards. No discernible difference. So that's good.

Looking a little more closely, the PCBCart silkscreen is better defined than the one by PCBWay which suffers from some "blooming". But that also makes the part references on the PCBCart PCB look a bit spidery so it's probably a good idea to thicken the text a bit for those.

Now let's look at drill/via alignment. The vast majority of the small 20-mil vias had drill holes punched completely within the copper pad. But there were a few vias in each set of boards that had "breakouts" like those shown below. Thankfully, there were no cases where the drill missed the via completely in either set. For this metric, the PCBWay boards were slightly superior to those from PCBCart but there were no outright failures in either.

The above image also shows the alignment of the soldermask with the BGA pads. Bad alignment can lead to BGA balls not connecting to the pad or having a ball short to a nearby, uncovered via pad. Neither of those is a good thing. The PCBWay boards have a bit more misalignment than those from PCBCart, but not as much overall as the image above would make you believe. Still, for this metric PCBCart has a slight edge.

Another factor to consider is via size. PCBWay can drill holes as small as 8 mils but they require a 6 mil annular pad so the total via diameter is 6 + 8 + 6 = 20 mils. PCBCart drills a larger 10 mil hole but they only need a 4 mil annular pad for a total via size of 18 mils. When you're putting vias between the pads of an 0.8mm BGA and then trying to squeeze traces between them, that extra 2-mil clearance is a big advantage. Of course, the smaller pad size will also lead to more of the drill breakouts we saw above.

Regarding price, I got 11 PCBs from PCBWay for $185 and 10 PCBs from PCBCart for $166. So the per-board price is about the same. But this changes all the time, so always check before submitting a board.

Now I'm on to building some CAT Boards using the new PCBCart PCBs. That will be the true test.