Are there PCB manufacturers that accept customer provided material ?

[electronic_guy]

Are there PCB manufacturers that accept customer provided material ? I need to send my own PCB board material to a PCB manufacturer. Any known manufacturer that accept the material from the cusotmer ?

Edit: The material is Rogers 5880 PCB for RF circuits. These boards itself are expensive. So providing them might be good to reduce price. That was my intension.

[thm_w]

What is the material and why is it so special

[rhodges]

If I sent a reel of something to an assembler, I would expect them to be cautious.
When I started college, my former boss gave me some 9-track tapes of various data to use for ... whatever.
I sent the tapes to the computer facility and they said they wanted to clean the tapes before putting them on the system.
It was like they did not trust my tapes, but I fully understand now that they would not run untested tapes through their drives.

[thm_w]

We are a leading manufacturer of PCB&PCBA in China.
If you have a new project, I am looking forward your PCB and list.
Welcome to email me: sales10@syspcb.com
We look forward to welcoming you to China.

Easy on the spam.
Why not answer the question: would you accept customer supplied FR4 PCB boards to use for production?
I would not, too much risk of contamination, materials out of spec, etc.

[electronic_guy]

What is the material and why is it so special

The material is Rogers 5880 PCB for RF circuits. These boards itself are expensive. So providing them might be good to reduce price. That was my intension.

[Berni]

The material is not even half the reason that these PCBs are expensive.

The PCB fab can buy the material at prices WAY cheaper than you could ever get, heck some of them might even own a factory that produces it.

The reason specialized RF boards are expensive is because they are low volume products with stricter requirements. Hence they don't have a dedicated production line for making them, where every minute or so a whole 1x1m panel of PCBs is spit out. Instead they need to stock these special materials in a range of thicknesses, then have people manually feed the board to various machines in the production process, paying attention all the time to follow the specified stackup correctly. Then once at the quality control phase these boards have a higher chance of getting rejected due to impedance out of tolerance or similar, so they have to throw them in the trash and go trough the whole process again. Having them use customer prided material just makes things even more expensive as it adds logistics and the need to verify the supplied material is good and would not risk destroying their expensive machines if put trough it.

If you want it cheap, then use standard FR4, in most cases it is good enough even for RF.

[AndyC_772]

It's unlikely to be worth it. If you want a board supplier to use a particular material, specify the material and let them procure it themselves.

Consider for a moment what happens if the yield is poor. Why? And who is responsible?

If the PCB vendor procures their own raw materials, you don't have to care about any of this. You pay the agreed price per working PCB, and don't care about scrap.

But suppose the PCB vendor uses your material, and they end up with a lot of scrap for whatever reason. They quite rightly blame your material, and no doubt charge for their wasted time and resources. They've no idea where the material came from, how old it is, how it's been handled or stored. They're not responsible for it, and likely won't be impressed if your only justification is "it's cheaper".

If I were a PCB supplier in this position, I'd decline the order.

[electronic_guy]

Thank you for explaining the process in detail to me. Now I do understand why some of the manufacuturers I contacted declined the offer.

But I have Rogers 5880 material with me and I need to use them for my RF prototyping. I don't know if normal ferric chloride method would work with them. Do you have any advice for this ? How to make the PCBs out of them myself ? What's the easiest and accurate way of doing that ? What should I expect since I'm not using the manufaturers with high precision ? In my local area, there are laser cutting shops and some CNC for normal PCBs copper boards, but I'm not sure whether they would be suitable.

[AndyC_772]

How much of this material do you have? What's it realistically worth? And is it copper clad already?

[electronic_guy]

I'm not going to reveal the amount and worth of it. Just looking for answer on how to print traces on them with an acceptable performace tolerance. The boards are copper cladded.

[Jackster]

You can get +- 0.1mm with enough trial and error using the printer toner method I would guess.
But you would have to control, to the second, every step of the process.

Some things are not worth wasting time on.

[Berni]

Laser cutting traces into a copper clad board board can be pretty tricky, needs the proper laser and properly tuned settings. I tried it before and there is a very very thin line between not cutting the copper or blasting trough it and setting fire to the substrate. Best method i found is to go almost trough the copper but leave a bit remaining, then etch the last little bit with acid.

The easiest home etching process is laser printer toner transfer, followed by acid etch. But you will likely want to first make a few boards on cheap regular copper clad to fine tune the process (especially if you want very fine feature sizes)

Also just because it is copper clad, it might not be full thickness copper clad, it might be just a thin layer because PCB manufacturers typically plate on additional copper thickness (it is easier for them to plate on extra copper than to etch it all away from final thickness). If you are to design distributed RF filters that can matter.

[elektryk]

I can recommend negative photoresist film for DIY PCB, in my case it works good down to 0.2mm traces.

Laser cutting traces into a copper clad board board can be pretty tricky, needs the proper laser and properly tuned settings. I tried it before and there is a very very thin line between not cutting the copper or blasting trough it and setting fire to the substrate. Best method i found is to go almost trough the copper but leave a bit remaining, then etch the last little bit with acid.

I'm willing to try 10W diode laser for that, but I will probably need to paint copper first and then etch.

I know that it won't give photoresist accuracy, but this method may be faster.

[Berni]

I used UV photoresist etching back when we didn't have dirt cheap Chinese PCBs. It does give as fine features as you can print on a mask. But it is a lot more involved as you need a UV exposure box and a developer chemical, The exposure time, concentration, developing time has to be tuned etc.. So it is more involved for the first time user.

For laser etching i was using a galvo aimed 50W 1064nm Q switched pulse laser. It has the power to cut very thin sheet metal if you really want (but is not meant for that). It has a decently small focal point so it can make pretty fine features. The method of burning off paint and then etching worked well with it too. But when directly cutting copper the problem is that it pumps a lot of heat into the PCB, potentially causing delamination, or when it does punch trough the copper layer, the FR4 underneath is way way more absorbent at this wavelength so it instantly burns. The way to get around it is to take many many lower power passes and wait a few seconds between each pass for the PCB to cool off, so it ends up taking a long time.

I thought it would be easy for quick prototypes, but it ended up being such a hassle that i rather went back to ordering cheep PCBs from China.

[Feynman]

Edit: The material is Rogers 5880 PCB for RF circuits. These boards itself are expensive. So providing them might be good to reduce price. That was my intension.

Don't know if that makes sense from a cost perspective. Consigned material usually disrupts the regular workflow for the manufacturer and might cost you even more at the end of the day. Also the manufacturer doesn't know, if you handled und stored the material properly.

[SonyHe-PCBTOK]

Most PCB manufacturers will reject customer supplied laminates (including Rogers 5880). This is because they will feel that it will disrupt their workflow, shift the inspection/liability to them, and negate their volume pricing advantage. Instead, you should specify “Rogers 5880” (exact thickness/copper weight) on your factory drawings and allow the manufacturer to purchase on a scale basis, which guarantees quality, yield and transparent veneer pricing. If you absolutely must commission your own material, there are handling fees, stringent inspection requirements, and liability for any scrap in accordance with standard commissioning policies.