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One of the best ways to avoid flex failures is by communicating with your flex fabricator early and often. Here are a couple key reasons why involving your flex and rigid-flex supplier early in the design of your product will help you save time and money—and produce a more reliable flex circuit.
My recent trip from Massachusetts to Japan was extremely complicated due to new travel regulations and restrictions for foreign visitors. The latest update from the Japanese embassy in the U.S. read that foreigners were not allowed to enter Japan without extraordinary emergency travel reasons. Japanese citizens who are living in foreign countries are the exceptions to this travel restriction.
With such an impressive list of benefits, it seems it might seem as though flexible circuit technology has reached its improvement limits. However, the principle of continuous improvement does not rest and it demands that we persist in our efforts do and make things better over time.
One of the biggest challenges facing PCB designers is not understanding the cost drivers in the PCB manufacturing process. This article is the latest in a series that will discuss these cost drivers (from the PCB manufacturer’s perspective) and the design decisions that will impact product reliability.
Rigid-flex circuits have become almost ubiquitous over the past decade; most personal electronic devices contain at least one rigid-flex circuit. But there’s a downside to rigid-flex: Respins are almost a given with rigid-flex designs. And rigid-flex respins can be quite expensive, since this technology costs quite a bit more, on average, than flex or rigid boards.
