Is it Reliable to Reduce PCB Cost

The total cost of the production of PCB has advanced with the the growth of the cost of circuit board materials and labor costs and so on. Manufactures have to consider how to ensure quality while reducing production costs in order to occupy the PCB market. PCBA main costs include PCB board costs, component procurement costs and SMT costs, if we want to analyze how to reduce the cost of PCB, we need to consider these several aspects.

Reduce the cost of the circuit board

First of all we should take the size of PCB design issue into consideration, the circuit board is cut from a piece of plate material. Within a reasonable range, the more PCB we cut from the plate material,the lower the price of every single PCB, which requires designers to carefully consider how to process the large copper clad laminate into a number pieces of CCL with the vertical or horizontal cutting method. In the design of multi-layer circuit board, you can consider the HDI process.Especially in PCB manufacturing and PCB assembly process, can save a lot of cost.At the same time, we can use CEM-3 material to replace the the widely used double-sided epoxy resin glass cloth CCL,but there is a significant lack of strength shortcomings. In addition we should minimize the number of  through-holes and don't arbitrarily reduce the hole diameter. Copper is replaced with silver paste to fill via holes during copper deposition, but the resulting circuit board is not suitable for highly reliable circuits.

Reduce component procurement costs

Manufacturers should pay attention to the combination of customer and market during procurement and try to establish good relationship with suppliers, share the risk and profits with them, only in this way can ensure the quality of components.

Reduce SMT costs

We usually use SMT process to reduce the production cost, while the entire production cost can be reduced according to one-time mass production.

 All of these can be done to reduce the cost of circuit board production, while achieving a certain quality assurance, but reduce the cost of the circuit board at the same time means that the quality of the circuit board will inevitably become worse, because manufacturers will tend to use more poor production materials and more rough production steps. So in the face of cost and quality , manufacturers still need to consider and catch their own point.