Why is the common board thickness of PCB manufacturers 1.6mm

The normal thickness of finished PCB board is between 0.8mm and 1.6mm, while the more common board thickness is designed by default according to the metric unit 1.6mm (the British unit is about 63mil), and many connector standards are also adapted to the 1.6mm specification. How did the 1.6mm thickness standard come about? Today, the circuit board manufacturer Xiaobian will take you to understand the origin of this standard

In the era of electronic tube, PCB industry was still in its infancy. Due to the high heat content and bulky volume of electronic tube components, it was not convenient to install them on printed circuit boards (requiring certain mechanical strength). At that time, the production and manufacturing of electronic products were basically manual scaffolding installation. PCB substrate reinforcement materials, copper foil and other manufacturing technologies have not yet realized commercial production.

Phenolic laminate is a kind of strong and well insulated polymer material, with heat resistance, water resistance, chemical resistance and withstand high current characteristics, although it is not specially developed as a circuit board, more widely used in decorative panel use, but phenolic laminate drilling performance or as a support for the installation of vacuum tube, its strength relative to gypsum board, cardboard, Or thin wood chips are much better, so it's only natural that PCB manufacturers choose phenolic laminates instead of cardboard or thin wood.

But punching holes in the phenolic laminate and wiring the wires to hold all the electronics together is still a laborious task, more laborious than playing with the cave-board, which is pre-punched, after all. It wasn't long before someone figured out a way to glue a sheet of copper foil onto a phenolic laminate and etch the interconnections between the components into the copper foil (in 1913, Berry in England invented the technique of coating the foil with an resist and etching the uncoated part to form a conductive pattern), thus creating a single-sided printed circuit board. Soon, the development of interconnecting systems between multiple boards created a related need for board-to-board connectors.

1/16 inch or 63mil was the manufacturing thickness of phenolic laminates, and the planet-to-plate connectors were designed to be 1/16 inch (63mil or 1.6mm) thick, forming the industry chain, and 1/16 inch (63mil or 1.6mm) thickness became the default industry standard.

Today, the development of substrate materials has been very diverse, but 1.6mm(or 63mil in imperial units) is still the default finished board thickness of PCB board manufacturers, but the standard board thickness range has been extended to 0.8mm~1.6mm. (The specific process of the plate factory shall prevail, and some plate factories are 0.6mm~2.5mm)

Of course, if you want to produce thinner or thicker (such as 20-layer board) PCB, it is also OK, such as 0.4mm or 3.0mm, but you need to pay extra board cost, so the customer needs to consider it when designing PCB.

There are many design and manufacturing factors to consider when determining PCB board thickness, such as:
Copper thickness
plate
The number of PCB layers
Signal type
Type of through-hole
Operating environment

Manufacturing factors that affect PCB thickness include:
Technological capability of drilling equipment
Copper thickness
Number of layers
Split-board method