Cost effectiveness of conductive ink printing on PTFE

[SreejitS]

Hello all!!

I am working on a project which requires multiple LC-tank circuits on PCB of approximately 40cm x 40cm resonating at 1MHz. I wanted to know whether it is cost effective to go for conductive ink screen printing process on plastic sheet as they do with keyboards. Are there any technical caveats that i should be aware of before jumping into them.

I am talking about circuits like shown below :
http://image.made-in-china.com/43f34j00jZSEFKhywPqH/Keyboard-Flexible-Printed-Printing-FPC-Circuit-Board.jpg

[CM800]

I'd have some quality concerns, It makes more sense in my mind to etch, you'd get much finer quality.

you can conductively coat nigh-anything, then etch it.

Is there any reason you can't use a standard PCB?

[SreejitS]

Is there any reason you can't use a standard PCB?

No, I can use a standard PCB. I want to know if the alternative option is cost effective or not.

[CM800]

I suppose a good question would be how many are you gonna be using per year?

I'd say PCB will be hard to beat, the competition between pcb manufacturers is quite big and the market-base is much larger then any other method.

[Ian.M]

There's two other issues here: 
1. Its *VERY* difficult to get anything to stick reliably to a PTFE surface, so the conductive ink is likely to flake off.
2. Conducive inks have a significantly higher resistivity than pure copper or silver, so the tank circuits will have lower Q.

Why would you even want a PTFE substrate at 1MHz?  Even SRBP is fine at such a low RF frequency.