Design Guidelines for Flex PCB Panels on JLCPCB

When you place orders for flexible PCBs on JLCPCB, there are some things that need to be noted. FPC panels are designed differently from rigid PCB panels which use mouse bites or V-cuts.

Requirements for Flex PCB Panels on JLCPCB are:

• 2 mm internal board spacing, preferably 3 mm when metal stiffeners are used
• 5 mm panel borders on all sides. Copper should be present throughout the borders except 1 mm clearance around fiducials and 0.5 mm around tooling holes.
• SMT fiducials should be 1 mm diameter and tooling holes 2 mm diameter. Fiducials should be 3.85 mm from centre to the panel edge. One fiducial and tooling hole should be placed in each corner of the panel, offsetting those in one corner by at least 5 mm to indicate orientation.
• Connecting tabs should be 0.7 to 1.0 mm wide.
• The overall panel size should be between 234 × 490 mm and 70 × 70 mm.
• For panels undergoing SMT assembly, add one fiducial next to each FPC unit. The board fabricator will indicate defective units to not be populated by painting over its fiducial.

FPCs with metal stiffeners: 0.8 mm slots around stiffener required for laser cutting; at least 3 mm spacing between boards.

To achieve optimal performance for your flexible PCB design, it is essential to use quality materials for PCB manufacturing. JLCPCB collaborates with leading raw material suppliers worldwide to provide top-notch, authentic A-grade boards for various PCB applications. Additionally, JLCPCB has five self-owned intelligent production bases that allow for economies of scale, resulting in reduced production costs so that be able to give back profits to customers as much as possible, letting prices no longer be an obstacle to hardware innovation. Moreover, JLCPCB offers new users up to $54 sign-up coupons. Click here to sign up on the website, upload your Gerber files, and begin ordering high-quality flex PCBs all at once!