With the upgrading of electronic products, FPC (flexible circuit board) caters to the development trend of light, thin, short, and small electronic products with its unique advantages and plays a critical cornerstone role in the electronic information industry. This paper analyzes the application of FPC in the actual application field, especially its application in the three fields of mobile phones, automobiles, and medical monitoring equipment, and makes a prospect for the future development of FPC.
What is Flex PCB?
Flexible circuit boards (FPC) have the advantages of high wiring density, lightweight, thin thickness, less wiring space restrictions, and high flexibility. Flex PCB is entirely in line with the development trend of light, thin and short electronic products and is an effective solution to meet the miniaturization and mobile requirements of electronic products. FPC can be bent, wound, and folded freely, and can withstand millions of times of dynamic bending without damaging the wires; and move and expand in three-dimensional space at will to achieve the integrated effect of component assembly and wire connection. FPC can significantly reduce the volume and weight of electronic products and is suitable for developing electronic products in the direction of high density, miniaturization, and high reliability. Therefore, FPC is widely used in PC and peripheral products, automotive electronics, medical equipment, communication products, consumer electronics, and other fields.
What are the advantages of flexible circuit boards?
FPCA (Flexible Printed Circuit Assembly), namely FPC assembly, is an extension of the FPC business industrial chain, and the mainstream technology in the industry is SMT. SMT (Surface Mount Technology) is the surface mount technology of electronic circuits, also known as surface mount or surface mount technology. It is a circuit assembly technology that mounts the surface-assembled components without leads or short leads (SMC/SMD for short) on the surface of a printed circuit board, then solders and assembles them by reflow soldering or dip soldering.
The application of SMT technology has the following advantages:
- The assembly density is high, and the electronic products are small in size and lightweight. The volume and weight of the patch components are only about 1/10 of the standard plug-in components. Generally, after SMT is adopted, the volume of electronic products is reduced by 40% to 60%, and the weight is reduced by 60%～to 80%.
- It has high reliability, strong earthquake resistance, low solder joint defect rate, and good high-frequency characteristics.
- It reduces electromagnetic and radio frequency interference.
- It is easy to realize automation and improve production efficiency.
- Fifth, save materials, energy, equipment, workforce, time, etc.
Applications of flexible circuit board
The demand for light, thin, short, and small electronic products has caused FPC to rapidly shift from military supplies to civilian use and consumer electronic products. Almost all high-tech electronic products that have emerged in recent years have adopted many flexible circuit boards. Japanese scholar Kenshi Sakura said in the book “High-Density Flexible Printed Circuit Boards”: Almost all electrical products use flexible circuit boards, but now it is challenging to find slightly more complex electronic products that do not use flexible circuit boards.