John, here's where you need to work with both your fabricator and your
assembly house.  Your assembly house will hopefully have design rules for
you to plan your array with.  You'll want to maximize the number of circuits
you can get into your panel while meeting those guidelines.  Then, you'll
need to figure out how many of those panels you can get from your
fabricators standard panel.  You may need to reduce the size of your panel
to get full utilization from the fabricators panel so you have the least
amount of scrap material.  It's a balancing act, but we've found that the
fewer times you have to move materials on the assembly shop floor, the
better off you are (less pain).  In other words, maximize the circuits per
panel.

You also may want to allow your assembly house to panelize the circuit if
you have no or little experience and they have a tool such as CAM 350 or
Camtastic.  That way, the right rails, breakaways and fiducials get placed
where they need to be for assembly.  The last place you want to do the
panelization is the fabricator as they want to maximize the yield of
individual circuits.

We work with several different CM houses who buy bare boards from many fab
houses.  We actually design the panel array based on the CM who's going to
get the job, using their design rules.  We provide them with Gerber files
containing the stencil and bare board fab data.  They tweak the stencil
appropriately.

Bob Croslin
Nielsen Media Research


-----Original Message-----
From: John Foster [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, July 12, 2004 2:32 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [TN] Question about panelization


I have been doing a lot of layouts lately of very small boards. These boards
require panelization. I was wondering if I could get a idea of whether
fabricators
prefer to get gerber that is already panelized or whether they prefer
to just get the one up gerber with a drawing that shows the panelization.


Also I was wondering at what board size does it become a pain for assembly.
I always try to put .250 inch manufacturing rails on boards for the
conveyors.


I have been doing a lot of boards on the 1" x 2" size.

Any input would be appreciated.

Thank You

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