Flexible PCB, also known as flexible circuit board, uses copper or electrolytic copper as the material, with good flexibility and bending resistance. Generally speaking, PCB is called rigid board. FPC is called flexible PCB. Small and medium flexible circuits / designs follow rigid board designs. But not exactly the same as a rigid circuit board. The specific differences can be summarized as follows:

1) Softness

The standard of FPC is good flexibility. Three dimensional space of FPC is very important, because bending and flexible application can save space and reduce board layer, mainly single side. The requirements of hard board materials are better, with compression, wear resistance and high temperature resistance, so the space is limited, common Multilayer PCB.

2) Bearing capacity of the line

Compared with rigid PCB, flexible PCB is very poor. The change from straight line to corner or different line width should be smooth transition. We can see many flex PCBs with serpentine arrangement. The current carrying capacity of the same line width as that of the hard board is much stronger than that of the soft board, so our common flexible PCB Applications, such as mobile phone lines, are used in places with small current.

3) Strike pad design

At the periphery of the impact pad, there is a change of rigid material from flexible material. The board panel is a soft board, which is more likely to damage the conductor. As a result, pads should be avoided in areas that are prone to bending. Rigid plate does not need to emphasize this problem.

4) Shape of plate

No matter the shape of the soft board and the hard board will be various, the shape of the flexible PCB is on the general preferred rectangle, so you can better save the substrate, and leave enough free margin on the edge of the board < p > in the shape, the general solution composed of the circle is better than the sharp internal angle, and the internal solution shape of the light is easily leads to the tearing of the board. A rigid plate is a fixed pattern, depending on the shape of the product.

5) Circuit board thickness

FPC is thinner than rigid circuit board. It is very good to make the thinnest 0.2 mm of conventional hard board. Although flexible PCB can be thinner than paper, it has a good development space in many fields. It can be seen from the above that Flex PCB and rigid board are different, each with its own field.