Cost & Quoting

Cost Per Flexible Circuit: Building a Defensible Quote for Printed Electronics

Silver ink and yield loss dominate flexible circuit cost. Here is how to build the quote line by line and where estimates go wrong.

Cost per flexible circuit stacks six buckets: silver ink, substrate, cure energy, print and finishing labor, scrap and rework, and overhead with margin. On most printed electronics jobs, silver ink is the single largest variable line, often 40 to 60 percent of material cost. At 600 to 800 dollars per kg, even 0.25 g of issued paste per circuit is 15 to 20 cents before any yield loss. That is why the Cost Per Flexible Circuit calculator starts with ink: a coverage estimate off by 3 microns of wet film changes ink cost per part by 15 to 20 percent, which swamps almost every other efficiency you can chase.

Substrate is the second material line and it is easy to underquote. PET film runs roughly 1.50 to 4.00 dollars per square meter depending on grade and coating; PEN and polyimide climb to 10 to 40 dollars per square meter for high-temperature or heat-stabilized stock. Price the full sheet you consume, not the printed area. If a 300 by 400 mm panel yields 0.12 m2 but the imposed layout only uses 70 percent, you pay for 0.12 m2 and recover 0.084 m2 of good real estate. That imposition efficiency belongs in the quote explicitly, because unused border and lane waste is real substrate you bought and cured.

Labor and machine time are usually quoted per panel, not per circuit, so divide by circuits-up. A screen line at 12 panels per hour with a fully burdened operator and machine rate of 90 dollars per hour is 7.50 dollars per panel. If each panel carries 24 circuits, that is about 0.31 dollars of print labor per circuit. Use the Labor Per Panel calculator and always schedule adjusted time, not base time: a 10 hour base print run with a 10 percent setup, flood, and cleaning allowance is 11 real hours, and quoting the 10 leaks a full hour of machine cost on every job.

Cure energy is a smaller line but a common blind spot. A well-loaded 12 kW oven curing 1000 panels over 8 hours adds only about 0.0115 dollars per panel, but the same oven run for 60 panels jumps to 0.19 dollars each. Energy cost per part is set by oven loading, not tariff, so the fix is scheduling full loads rather than negotiating power. Photonic cure cuts energy and substrate risk but carries lamp replacement and capital that belong in overhead, not the per-part energy line. Keep the Cure Energy figure honest by using measured average draw at 40 to 70 percent of nameplate.

Scrap and yield loss is where quotes quietly die. Each stage multiplies: print yield, registration, lamination, die cut, and test. Five stages at 95 percent each compound to 0.95 to the fifth, about 77 percent overall, meaning you must start 1.30 circuits for every one shipped. Silver scrapped mid-process is unrecoverable, so a circuit that fails at test has consumed full ink, substrate, cure, and labor. The Scrap Web Cost and Rework Cost calculators put a dollar figure on this. A defensible quote loads good-part cost by dividing total cost by stacked yield, not by pretending yield is 100 percent.

Rework is not free recovery. Reprinting a layer, cleaning a smear, or hand-repairing an open costs labor at the full burdened rate plus a second pass of ink and cure, and it often will not restore the part to first-pass reliability. Price rework at 2 to 4 times the per-panel touch labor and cap the attempts. If a defect mode reworks more than once or two out of ten panels, scrapping is usually cheaper than chasing recovery, because the third rework pass on a 7.50 dollar panel has already spent 22 dollars of labor against a part that may still fail test.

Overhead and margin go on last, and the trap is applying margin before yield. Build up true good-part cost first: ink plus substrate plus cure plus labor, divided by stacked yield, then add scrap and rework, then overhead, then margin. If direct cost per shipped circuit is 1.10 dollars, a 35 percent shop overhead makes it 1.49, and a 25 percent margin lands the quote near 1.98. The Quote Price calculator applies this in order. Apply margin to a pre-yield number and you look competitive on the spreadsheet and lose money on every roll once real yield shows up.

Estimates go wrong in three predictable places. First, using nominal ink deposit instead of a weighed coupon, which underquotes the largest line item. Second, quoting ramp yield as if it were steady-state, so the first production rolls at 60 to 70 percent stacked yield blow the budget while the line stabilizes. Third, ignoring minimum ink batch and screen-life costs on short runs, where a 200-panel job cannot amortize setup the way a 5000-panel job does. Quote short runs with a per-lot floor for setup and screen making, and quote new designs at ramp yield with a stated step to steady state so the customer sees the curve and you are not carrying the loss.

Published 2026-07-01.