- ALTIUM DESIGNER PCB PANELIZATION HOW TO
- ALTIUM DESIGNER PCB PANELIZATION FULL
- ALTIUM DESIGNER PCB PANELIZATION PC
- ALTIUM DESIGNER PCB PANELIZATION PROFESSIONAL
If you’re hand-assembling your boards, or only having a few professionally built, you probably don’t want a panel. Many shops these days, like Screaming Circuits, can take boards either individually or in panels, so this isn’t a hard-and-fast requirement as it was a decade or so ago. This allows the boards to go through the automated assembly equipment. Panels come with a thin strip of board material around the outside of the array of circuit boards.
ALTIUM DESIGNER PCB PANELIZATION PROFESSIONAL
The answer is that some professional assembly shops can only assemble board in panels. Individually routed boards sound nice, and they are, so why would you want to buy boards that still form part of a larger panel?
ALTIUM DESIGNER PCB PANELIZATION PC
When you order PC boards, you’re typically given four panel options: individually routed (as I just described), V-score, tab routed, and tab routed with perfs (perforations). It’s a very cost-effective way to purchase a small number of blank PC boards. Today, this is referred to as “individually routed.” It delivers a nice smooth edge with none of the little “nibs” protruding that you see on many boards that came out of a panel. Prior to shipping, each board would be cut out with a router. That allowed them to fill up an entire panel and split the cost amongst different jobs. They started combining small quantities of different board designs from different customers. I don’t know if they were the first, but - if not - they were pretty close to it. About 25 years ago, our raw board fab partner company in this business, Sunstone Circuits (then called PCB Express), took the family panel a step further. We don’t fabricate boards instead, we specialize in building your short-run, one-off, and prototype PCB assembly. Furthermore, you may then see a panel comprising multiple sets of the same four or five different boards. In what’s called a “family panel,” all of the different boards are combined into one panel. Some designs require a set of several different circuit boards. There are some cases, though, where the boards will be different. In a standard panel, each copy of the board will be exactly the same.
ALTIUM DESIGNER PCB PANELIZATION FULL
A full panel containing 15 copies of a PCB (Source: Screaming Circuits) Oftentimes, that large panel will be cut into quarters to better fit assembly machines before being sent out for assembly.Ī panel is great if you need many copies of a PC board, but if you need just two boards that are 4″ x 2″, for example, then you’re going to pay for a lot of wasted material (at least, you did back in the old days). The above is a bit of an oversimplification, but - essentially - that’s the standard way of building a large quantity of boards, and it has been for decades. The finished panel will have as many copies of your board as can fit into the available space. Multiple sheets of the material are etched and pressed together to form a full panel. The boards start as sheets of a raw fiberglass-like material with a layer of copper, at about 30 x 30 inches square. For high-volume manufacturing, blank printed circuit boards are built in large panels - also called “arrays” or “palettes” - of multiple boards. If you typically just build one or two copies of a printed circuit board (PCB), or if your only experience with them is buying a pre-built board, you may not be familiar with the concept of panelization.
ALTIUM DESIGNER PCB PANELIZATION HOW TO
Hi there, and welcome to Part 3 in my “How to Build a PCB” miniseries (see also How to Build a PCB: QFN Footprints and How to Build a PCB: Through-Hole or Surface-Mount?). If you have a lot of boards, or if your boards are very small, then you probably want them to be in a panel.
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