What's the process in a flex circuit fab? How extensive (costly) is the tooling? Is there a *practical* incentive to select a single vendor for prototype quantities AND production quantities? Or, does the tooling cost fade away in the larger production buy?
I only need 1K prototypes and production will probably be 100K+/yr. Is it worth even THINKING about the production house at this point? Or, just write-off the setup costs for the prototype run?
Is it easier to just leave that decision to the board fab folks??
Yes. I received (offlist) a couple of responses which included artwork and pricing. Apparently, many of the things you don't think twice about doing with a rigid PCB are very costly in flex!
How so? I would just assume that hard tooling reduced the need for RE-tooling, over time.
I'd originally had the costs of the hard-tooling for some of my injection molded parts in mind ("not insignificant"). But, the tooling for flex seems to be considerably cheaper (order of magnitude?) -- at least from the figures that I've seen for the artwork/quotes provided to me.
The concensus recommendation, so far, is to just eat the tooling for the prototypes and let the production flex amortize *their* costs. My volumes are high enough that hard tooling "makes sense".
Recommendation from the folks (customers) I've been talking with suggests treating it as a component for the (rigid) fab process. Any assembly required of/on the flex, they say, should be shopped out to the vendor that makes the flex -- as they are more likely to be aware of the pitfalls that one would encounter.
[I hadn't realized just how different from rigid PCB assembly it actually is! I've been reworking most of my artwork based on suggestions from these examples on how to reduce costs and improve manufacturability. Also, leaves you only "hostage" to the flex vendor (for the flex tooling) instead of the rigid fab for BOTH!]
Small runs can be done economically using a photographic process, larger runs might use a silk-screen etc, this could be faster and use cheaper consumables but more expensive tooling.
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