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 --------------------------------------------------- Technet Mail List provided as a service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8e To unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in the BODY (NOT the subject field): SIGNOFF Technet To temporarily halt or (re-start) delivery of Technet send e-mail to [log in to unmask]: SET Technet NOMAIL or (MAIL) To receive ONE mailing per day of all the posts: send e-mail to [log in to unmask]: SET Technet Digest Search the archives of previous posts at: http://listserv.ipc.org/archives Please visit IPC web site http://www.ipc.org/contentpage.asp?Pageid=4.3.16 for additional information, or contact Keach Sasamori at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.5315 ----------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------- Technet Mail List provided as a service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8e To unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in the BODY (NOT the subject field): SIGNOFF Technet To temporarily halt or (re-start) delivery of Technet send e-mail to [log in to unmask]: SET Technet NOMAIL or (MAIL) To receive ONE mailing per day of all the posts: send e-mail to [log in to unmask]: SET Technet Digest Search the archives of previous posts at: http://listserv.ipc.org/archives Please visit IPC web site http://www.ipc.org/contentpage.asp?Pageid=4.3.16 for additional information, or contact Keach Sasamori at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.5315 -----------------------------------------------------