Factors that affect the Price of FPCB

FPC is made from polyester film or polyimide, and has advantages that other types of circuit boards don’t have: light and thin, high density, high flexibility, bendable and foldable. Compared with traditional interconnection technique, FPC can withstand millions of bend, is easy to install, and has excellent heat dissipation.

So what factors affect the price of FPC?

1. The chosen materials of FPC cause different price

For example, ordinary double-sided flexible board, the board materials generally include PI, PET, etc, the thickness of the board varies from 0.0125 mm to 0.10 mm, and the thickness of copper varies from 1/3oz to 3oz, which cause a great price difference. Also, different material manufacturers, namely, different material brands cause a certain price difference. Above is the diversity of the price of chosen material. The material also contains steel or FR4 stiffener material, auxiliary materials, etc.

2. Different process of FPC causes different price

Different production process also causes different costs. For example, if we use immersion gold, immersion tin or OSP, or requires the precision of the shape, using wet film process or dry film process or others all will form different costs and will lead to different price.

3. The technical difficulties of FPC itself cause different price

With the same requirement and process, if the design difficulties of FPC itself are different, the costs will be different.

 
For example, two types of circuit boards, one has an over-standard quantity hole on the board, but the other one with hole quantity within the standard range, in such condition, the cost of drilling is also different.

 
As for line and space on FPC, one has a conductor width and conductor spacing greater than 0.1 mm, while the other has a conductor width and conductor spacing less than 0.1 mm, and it will also cause a price difference. Because boards with higher technical difficulty will have higher rejection rate, the cost will definitely increase, resulting in different price.

4. Different demands of customers cause different price

The level of the customer's demands will directly influence on the pass-rate of the board manufactured, for example, one kind of board can have a 98% pass-rate according to IPC-A-6013, class II, but it may only have a 90% pass-rate according to class III, which will result in different costs for board manufacturers and finally lead to different product price.

5. Different FPC manufacturers cause price diversity

Even for the same type of product, because different manufacturers have different process equipments and technical levels, they will have different costs. Nowadays, many China FPCB manufacturers prefer producing ENIG FPC because of simple process. However, few FPC manufacturers face high rejection rate for ENIG FPC, which will cause them high cost. Thus, they would rather produce OSP surface or immersion tin surface FPCB, their quotation for OSP FPC is lower than other manufacturers.

6. Different payment ways cause different price

Generally, China FPC manufacturers adjust the FPC price by the difference of payment way, ranging from 5%-10%, which causes the difference of the price.

7. Different regions cause price diversity

Inside China, from the south to north, the price presents the increasing trend. There are certain differences among regions, thus the position difference also leads to the price diversity.

8. Different plating ways cause different prices, the cost of partial electroplating is 15% higher than the cost of full electroplating.

9. The surface treatment of the gold finger, the difference between gold plating and ENIG is about 5%.

10. The defect rate in the FPC production process also affect the unit price of FPC

11. The cost of SMT as OEM and the defect rate also affect the unit price of FPC