PCB Blog - Benefits of PCB mirror board

The usual PCB structure is that the CS and SS faces are on the top and bottom sides of the board, respectively, but some need to make a PCB Mirror Board because of the need to weld the plates to one side Both the SS faces and the separate PCB of the CS faces.

In PCBA manufacturing, there are two types of PCB Mirror Boards. The first type is a Different side mirror board, that is, the first side of a board appears on the same side as the second side of another board. Another type is the Same side mirror board.

PCBA manufacturers require PCB Mirror Board designs for two main reasons and benefits:

1. You can make full use of the advantages of SMT long lines to achieve higher efficiency

The overall efficiency of an SMT is good or not, as long as you simply look at whether there is a machine in idle to judge, if you can wait completely without the machine, then we can say that the efficiency of this SMT line reaches 100%.

But is it really that easy to achieve 100% efficiency? As SMT machines are typing faster and faster, SOC (System On Chip) parts are becoming more and more popular, and there are fewer and fewer parts aboard. What is the great efficiency or speed improvement of solder paste printing machines? So now the bottleneck of SMT lines in many PCBA factories appears in the paste printer, which means that the paste printer has no rest, while other more expensive machines are empty and so on.

So let's say that if it takes about 25 seconds to print the tin plate once, and if the pick place that follows it takes only 15 seconds to complete, then the machine will have 10 seconds left, which means idle wastes 10 seconds. It's like buying an advanced Ferrari sports car and parking in the garage because every machine on the SMT is very expensive. So make the most of their value and don't give them any time to wait so they can make money with it.

So someone has come up with a way to make use of Panelization in order to increase the usage time of the patch maker and greatly improve its efficiency. However, you can't leave the paste printer empty, so there is a positive and negative inverted Yin-Yang jigsaw so that the same side of the board can have more different electronic parts or parts at the same time so that the original SMT long line with multiple sheet-layers can fully play its role.

Another important purpose is to get up and down to work on just one line without wasting time changing lines.

2. It can save the space wasted by PCB bare board, i.e. increase the efficiency of Panelization and save money

PCB bare board wastes space, which means improving the efficiency of Panelization and saving money. For mass production and low cost, ordinary PCB circuit board manufacturers usually buy basic standard-size panels, and some may only buy a larger number of baseboard sizes instead of a full range.

For some circuit boards that are not square in shape, the design of the cathode and anode plates can have the opportunity to extrude 1-2 pcs circuit board into the same circuit board, which can improve the efficiency of the board and achieve the purpose of saving costs.

Because the price of a circuit board  is calculated based on the usage of the base plate, if you use the same size of the base plate, design A can only produce one circuit board, design B can produce two circuit boards, and the price of board A will be twice that of board B.