4 Major Reasons Affect The Bare PCB Price Of PCB Factories

What is a bare PCB

The bare PCB board is an important electronic component, the support of electronic components, and the provider of electrical connections to electronic components. As electronic equipment becomes more complex, more parts are needed, and the circuits and parts on the PCB are becoming more and more dense. Bare boards (with no parts on them) are also often referred to as “printed wiring boards (PWBs)”.

The substrate of the board itself is made of insulating and non-bending materials. The small lines that can be seen on the surface are copper foil, which was originally covered on the entire board, but during the manufacturing process, some of them are etched away, and the remaining parts become netted small lines. These lines are called conductor patterns or wiring and are used to provide circuit connections to the parts on the PCB. Usually, the color of the PCB is green or brown, which is the color of the solder mask.

It is an insulating protective layer that protects the copper wire and also prevents the parts from being soldered to the wrong place. A silkscreen is also printed on top of the solder mask. Usually, text and symbols (mostly white) are printed on this to indicate the position of each part on the board. The screen printing surface is also known as the icon surface.

The price of bare PCB proofing

There are many factors that affect the proofing price of PCB factories, including PCB substrate, production process, process difficulty, number of proofs, customer demand, region, payment method, etc. Here’s a quick look at the specific factors!

1: Different PCB materials lead to different prices, thin plate materials usually include FR-4, CEM-3, etc., the thickness of the board varies between 0.6mm and 3.0mm, and the thickness of copper varies between 1/2Oz 3 oz, thus creating a cost gap, as far as solder mask ink is concerned, there is also a certain price difference between ordinary thermosetting oil and photosensitive green oil.

2: Different production techniques lead to different prices, different production processes will incur different costs, gold and tinplate plates, gong plates (grinding plates) and beer boards (perforated) plates, as well as the use of screen printed circuits and dry film circuits will lead to different costs.

3: The difficulty of the sample leads to different prices, even if the material is the same, the process is the same, the difficulty of proofing will also cause different costs, two plates with different apertures, different line widths and line spacing will have different production costs, due to the high scrap rate of the plate, it is difficult to prove, the cost will inevitably increase.

4: Different customer requirements will also lead to different prices, the level of customer demand will directly affect the benefits of the model, according to IPC-A-600E the pass rate of the first category is 98%, according to the third category, the pass rate may only be 90%, resulting in different costs for the plate maker.

5: Different PCB manufacturers lead to different prices, even for the same product, they will have different costs because different manufacturers have different processing equipment and technical levels.

6: The price is different due to other factors such as expedited fee, levy, labor water and electricity fee, management fee, logistics fee, etc.

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