When designing and manufacturing printed circuit boards (PCBs), it’s easy to overlook the depaneling process. After all, traditional thinking has been that developing thinner boards, designing the layouts for maximum efficiency, and engineering smaller components will produce the most savings.
However, if PCB manufacturers focus merely on reducing size and increasing yield, they may fail to realize how important depaneling can truly be. Worse yet, in their haste to produce more PCBs, many manufacturers have ignored the developments in depaneling altogether and, consequently, have significantly fallen behind some of their competitors.