Comparison of traditional cutting and laser cutting for Flex circuits material

FPC, flexible printed circuit board, because soft material with free bending, coiling, folding and other advantages, greatly reduce the volume of electronic products, has been widely used in aerospace, military, mobile communication, portable computer peripherals, PDA, digital cameras, and other fields.

As an important component of all kinds of electronic and electrical products, there are many kinds of processes and materials on FPC. They include below materials,

1. Copper foil 

The utility model discloses a negative electrolytic material, a thin, continuous metal foil deposited on the base layer of the circuit board as the conductive body of the PCB;

2. Cover layer film 

It’s also called polyimide film, with excellent heat resistance, is an indispensable part of FPC (flexible printed circuit board).  

The functions of polyimide film are as follows:

•  Protect copper foil from being exposed to the air and avoid oxidation of copper foil; 

•  Cover subsequent surface treatment, such as areas that do not need gold plating are covered with PI; 

•  Welding resistance in the subsequent surface mounting process.

3. PET film

PET film is a kind of film with comprehensive performance, high toughness, excellent heat and cold resistance. It is also a kind of printed circuit board material.

4. EIM electromagnetic membrane

EIM electromagnetic film is a vacuum sputtering method, can be on different substrates (PET/PC/ glass, etc.) coating shielding materials; 

5. Conductive adhesive 
Conductive adhesive is a kind of adhesive with certain conductivity after curing or drying. Its function is to connect a variety of conductive materials together to form an electrical path between the connected materials.

6. FR4

The grade code of a fire-resistant material is fr-4 reinforcing plate, FPC reinforcing plate, FR-4 laminated plate, epoxy plate, etc. Its bonding sheet and inner core thin copper-clad plate are important base materials of multi-layer printed circuit boards.  

7. 3M adhesive tape

It is mainly used for pasting FR4 and FPC with the thickness of 0.4mm and above, and used as the FPC auxiliary materials. 

The above are common FPC flexible circuit board materials.

The traditional depaneling methods is die punching or routing, now we the laser cutting methods are more and more widly used on flex circuits material processing, how about the comparison between them?

Traditional cutting

Traditional mechanical depaneling methods such as die punching and routing yield inadequate results in this regard, with large cut widths and stressors too extreme for intricate flex circuits, take long lead time and high mold cost. Therefore, it's necessary to find a new process for FPC, that's UV Laser cutting.    

Laser cutting method

Compared with traditional cutting methods, laser cutting does not require any pre-production, can cut a variety of materials, non-contact processing, there is no tool wear, processing parts of different shapes, there is no need to replace the "tool", only need to change the cutting parameters. Laser cutting produce low noise, small vibration, no pollution. Just import the drawing into the computer, one key processing production, no manual loading and unloading, simple operation, reduce most of the labor time cost, achieve full automation production.

Advantages of laser cutting

•  Non-contact processing, no damage to the material, high cutting quality, no stress effect

• Reduce the molding cost , no waste, automatic production, save labor cost.

• With UV cold light source, fine cutting, cutting edge without burr, no glue overflow, less carbonization.

• High production efficiency, full automatic production, double worktables;

Product structure advantages

•  Automatically load and unload system 

Automatic design of reel automatic feeding, save time and cost without manual operation, more efficient.

• Double laser head and double worktables design 

Double laser head and double worktables, processing at the same time, laser power concentration, higher efficiency, better material cutting effect.

• Automatic collecting system

Automatic collecting after cutting, two tray devices can automatic receiving, automatic counting system, convenient and fast.