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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 Hitechpcb suggest sticking with the bare basics for Metal core PCB 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 Metal based PCB 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 MPCB prototype.