It's very important for those commodity managers to understand the critical PCB process. Let's see how PCB manufacturer Shenzhen BQC Circuits tells you . This part will be focus on the conventional rigid PCB process and we will continue this for flexible PCB fabrication in next section.

   Generally the rigid PCB process includes below 19 processes. You can understand the difficulty of PCB fabrication as the PCB manufacturer China should have specific quality control for each single process to maintain the superior quality performance. Basically the flexible PCB fabrication requires similar process flow with conventional rigid PCB.

The entire PCB process flow includes material cutting, inner dry film, inner etching, inner AOI inspection, layup, laminate pressing, drilling, PTH plating, panel plating, outer dry film, pattern plating, outer layer etching, outer layer AOI inspection, solder mask and silk screen print, surface finish, routing / punching, E-testing, final visual inspection, packing. It requires 3 days for the entire process.

There are at least four individual periodic inspections during the PCB process and many of the PCB manufacturer have additional inspection process on top of this four to screen any quality defects before it runs to the next process. Flexible PCB fabrication also requires the same strict inspections for the quality consistency performance.