Advantages
PCB milling has advantages for both prototyping and also for some specialist PCB designs.
Prototyping can provide a fast-turnaround board production process without the need for wet processing. If a CNC mill is already used for drilling, this single machine can carry out both parts of the process.
Some PCBs, requiring extensive drilling or profiling of the board outline are particularly suitable for production by milling. Where the tracks must precisely follow the board shape, using the same CNC mill for both reduces registration and scaling errors. Many boards that are simple for milling would be almost impossible by wet etching and manual drilling afterwards.
In mass production, milling is unlikely to replace etching although the use of CNC is already standard practice for drilling the boards.
Read more about this topic: Printed Circuit Board Milling
Famous quotes containing the word advantages:
“No advantages in this world are pure and unmixed.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“The respect for human rights is one of the most significant advantages of a free and democratic nation in the peaceful struggle for influence, and we should use this good weapon as effectively as possible.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“Can you conceive what it is to native-born American women citizens, accustomed to the advantages of our schools, our churches and the mingling of our social life, to ask over and over again for so simple a thing as that “we, the people,” should mean women as well as men; that our Constitution should mean exactly what it says?”
—Mary F. Eastman, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4 ch. 5, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)