Keeping MCPCB Prototypes Cost Friendly

 Keeping MCPCB Prototypes Cost Friendly

Electrical engineers and designers around the world are always looking for information and suggestions with lowering their prototype cost’s for metal core printed circuit boards (MCPCBs). Cofan believes there are several important factors when designing a circuit board which will help keep your price per unit as low as possible. Electrical engineers should work with the following to keep the overall cost down. Engineers and production management from Cofan suggest sticking with the bare basics for MCPCB designs. Features and processes like copper, ENIG/Imm Au, board size, high end dielectric prepreg, complex CNC routing or V-scoring and number of layers are the key cost factors. Stick with an aluminum base alloy, 1-2 oz. Cu foil and a dielectric material that provides 1-2 W/mK of thermal conductivity help. Then focus on keeping the surface finish to a lead free HAL or OSP and the profiling of the board simple enough for V-scoring instead of CNC routing. This is your entry level MCPCB and electrical engineers should stick with this if they can. When you add extra features to a design like heavy copper foil, blind vias, epoxy filled vias, thermal vias, complex machining/profiling and expensive surface finishes, these features and processes will typically add an extra 20-30% in price and will be costly for production volume Another factor to consider is that the panel size per manufacturer is usually 18”x24”. A half inch is required around the full panel for handling/manufacturing so you are left with 17 ”x 23” of manufacturable space. So when you design your MCPCB try to focus on using as much of that space as possible and only one to two panels worth for a prototype. About Cofan-PCB Cofan-PCB is part of the Cofan-USA group and is located in the northern part of Toronto, Canada. They are a private company focused on circuit board manufacturing for OEMs and electronic contract manufacturers (CMs) globally. Specializing in MCPCB manufacturing for LED lighting, power and electric vehicle corporations and will support both prototype and production volume requirements. Our expertise is in single sided and two-layer constructions with advanced materials and design constructions capable of up to 280W/mK thermal conductivity.