Depaneling Layer Thickness

It’s not easy being a PCB design engineer. It involves having so many choices and design considerations, but it’s usually the things that they have no choice in that make their job very difficult.

Issues like copper trace width, copper layer thickness, component profiles and overall PCB size restrictions would ruin a perfectly good workday for any engineer.

However, one of the issues that PCB designers have to increasingly deal with recently is the thickness of the PCBs.

Due to increasing design complexity, the pressure to add more layers to a single PCB is increasing with every new fab design.

Designers are under severe pressure to limit their fab thicknesses to be able to use laser depaneling. This comes as mechanical routing is not an option anymore with sensitive components on the panels and really small boards. This conundrum has halted more projects than you think, with no known solution in sight.

Until now.

Laser depaneling is usually reserved for thinner PCB designs. This is partly because of a fear of burning, melting and incomplete separation on the thicker PCBs. As we’ve mentioned previously, those are issues that you’ll find with our competitors, not us!

Through the use of the latest UV laser technology from LPKF and our brilliant engineering team, we recently are able to depanel boards that are 130 mils thick.

Yes, you read that correctly 0.130” thick!

Granted that this is not a usual thickness for board designs. There’s the 16 mil, the 34 mil, the 40 mil and even the 62 mil. We have processed all those thicknesses wonderfully in the past. As a result, we were recently challenged to see if we can depanel 90 and 130 mil PCBs. Guess what?

We did it!

You wanna know what else?

We can go even thicker!

So we invite you to bring over your thickest PCB design and head our way. You will not be disappointed!