Some fabrication companies will provide a panel template on their website. It’s common to see some designers attempt to make a panel, only to have the PCB fabrication house modify it or use their own panel simply because the designer did not create the panel correctly. If you send files for a single board to a fabrication house, the fabricator will create their own panel that complies with their tooling requirements. Designing a PCB Panelīefore we look at how to design a panel, it’s important to note that not all manufacturers will require you to supply a panel design. In this lesson, we’ll look briefly at panels and how they can be designed in your PCB design software. In cases where a designer does need to design a panel, the design needs to account for the required tooling features and clearances needed to detach a finished board from its panel. If you’re a designer, this all begs the question: whose job is it to design a panel, and what exactly goes into a panel design? It depends on the manufacturer you’ll work with, but an individual PCB designer does not always have to design a panel. A fabricated panel will eventually be cut or routed into its individual PCBs, but a design is put into the fabrication process by first transposing the design into a panel.

That point is the following: PCB fabrication houses produce panels of PCBs in parallel, not individual boards. Back in the first unit in this course, we brought up one important point about PCB manufacturing.

Altium designer pcb panelization