Bittele's Supporting Options for Multi-Board Designs

Here at Bittele, was are always dedicated to providing our clients with the highest quality and most efficient solutions to their PCB, PCBA and turnkey projects. There are a few different options that we have that include the efficient use of panelization for certain projects in order to reduce costs and simplify the manufacturing process altogether.

The first option we have is for single projects with only one unique PCB design. Panelization options for these projects will automatically be considered for all projects that fall under this category at no additional costs. Clients will have the option of receiving their completed boards as panels or separated if they so desire. There is no need to send us any panelized Gerbers (unless the client would specifically like a certain panelization style to be used) as we will always use the most efficient panel strategy that our engineers deem appropriate for any given project. By default, any project that is smaller than 2x2 inches may be panelized during the fabrication process for efficiency.

The second panelization options we have are for projects that require multiple PCB’s on a single panel. This may be a single project that carries multiple PCBs. The maximum number of unique PCBs that we can work with on any given panel is 3. The number of total PCBs on any panel will depend on the PCB sizes and the total panel size. It is important to note that although 2 or 3 unique PCBs may be present on a given single project, they will always be treated as 2 or 3 separate PCBs for the quotation purposes. There will still always be savings when compared to printing 2 or 3 separate projects, since everything is still being panelized onto a single panel. All PCBs on a panel must have the same number of layers and material requirements in order to be panelized.

The third panelization option we have are for completely separate projects that may not have any correlation with each other. As long as the same number of layers and material requirements are met, we may panelize multiple projects (with the same limit of 3 unique PCB designs as in case 2). Panelizing your projects like this will cut down on costs when compared to ordering 3 separate projects. You can save money by achieving better price breakpoints if there are shared items throughout each BOM for each project. It is important to note that in order to have multiple projects panelized, there must not be any repeating reference designators among them (the same is true for case 2, however it’s expected that a single project with multiple PCBs shouldn’t have repeating reference designators anyways). In some cases, your BOM may need to be adjusted if there are any cases of repeating reference designators.