Milling and routing

Milling and routing

Milling or routing is a technique performed on a CNC machine with a routing tool. Routing is used to form the contour of the PCB at the very end of the production process when we separate the individual PCBs from the production panel.

What we here mean with “milling” is a form of routing performed inside the PCB. This can be required to cut out the contour of a component, or to make room for any mechanical connection or for making slots, either NPTH or PTH in the board.

The standard router is 2mm in diameter. Smaller diameters up to 0.5mm are possible but have cost implications.

Production panel
Panels consist of multiple circuit board designs combined together in order to form a single large board called a “panel”. Some designs strive to fit multiple circuit boards onto a single panel, as more circuit boards on one panel can be more cost-efficient. There are two main types of panelization, simple panels (also called arrays), and complex panels. Simple panels have the same circuit board repeated on one panel, while complex panels are composed of different circuit boards on the same panel.

Panelization is a way to safely manufacture multiple PCBs simultaneously while keeping the PCB’s separation process afterwards as smooth as possible. In terms of large volume PCB manufacturing, the cost will be lower based on how many boards fit onto a single panel as the process will be more efficient. Higher panelization efficiency requires carefully setting PCB design sizes for effective panel space usage. For the highest efficiency, circuit board length and/or width should be integer divisors of default panel size when margin and spacing are taken into account.

We at Hopetimepcb offer panelization services to clients for PCB fabrication , but we do not offer any set default panel sizes. We only require the PCB design to be panelized to have a circuit board size within a range of 50mm*50mm to 500 *500mm. Hopetimepcb primarily produces low and medium volumes of PCB . Therefore when fabricating , we typically will automatically adjust for the most appropriate panel size for better material utilization . With these smaller volumes of PCB fabrication , the cost-saving from higher production efficiency is not significant ; therefore , Hopetimepcb does not offer cost-saving for using panelization. However, producing multiple designs simultaneously does save a portion of the shipping costs.You are not required to layout the panels yourself as our technicians will do this to optimize our process.

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