Factors that influence PCB price

PCB manufacturing employs many new areas of technology and this has enabled significant improvements to be made both in the reduction of sizes of components and tracks used, and in the reliability of the boards. There are many factors that can affect PCB price including the material, number of layers, surface finish, delivery time, the design size of boards, process technology and production standards etc. Shenzhen PCB maker SysPCB will give you a brief idea as below.

Material: Price for the board material is different according to different quality and its tolerance range. For example, supplier produce a batch of board which is within + / - 0.05 tolerance range, but our customer require that the boards thickness tolerance must within +/-0.025, we have to choose those CCL within +/-0.025 tolerance for production, which will be much harder to make. Under this condition, the price will be expensive 50% or so than the usual price. Also, if there are special requirements for soldermask or silkscreen, then the price will be different. Because PCB manufacturer need to by this material form their supplier specially.

Number of layers: Most customer prefer smaller and lighter product, they do not consider the size of the PCB board as often as layers. An alternative is to add more copper layers onto the PCB board, the additional layers allow more space for the routing of the traces. While increase the layer help increase the available space, it will also increase the cost of production and maintenance. In most case, our recommendation to our customer is to stick to at most two layer PCB board.

Surface finish: In general, immersion gold, HAL and OSP are the most often surface finish choice of our customer for their PCB printed circuit board. Because the production time of those three boards is different, it can influence the delivery time. Let we take OSP and HAL for example, it will take about 10 minutes to complete, but for immersion gold, it need more than 30 minutes to complete(according to the normal 1u"),what is more, if the thickness of immersion gold is more thicker the production time is more longer, so its cost is also expensive than HAL. Also the Gold price is much higher than the tin, so as we all understand, ENIG PCB price is higher than HASL PCB.

Delivery time: And of course time. The faster you need it, the more it will cost, the lead-time for PCB design work depends on the market. We have a limited resource and the lead-time may varies in the different period of the year.  Also the Payment term may affect the price of PCB sometimes.

Manufacturing requirements: for example, if customer needs IPC Class 3 PCB, the price of it will be higher than PCBs with IPC Class 2 compliant PCB. If customer need special outline for PCB, it will add routing time in PCB manufacturing, this will also affect the price.