“Wise Cut”, as the name suggests, is to intelligently and smartly apply technology to enhance the utilization of copper cladded laminate sheets in the manufacturing of printed circuit boards (PCBs).

In the production of PCBs, copper clad laminates account for the largest proportion of costs ranging from 70% in the single sided PCBs to 40% for the multi-layer PCBs.  Increasing laminate utilization rate is the fundamental way to save material costs.

EPC International Limited is a Hong Kong company established in 2007 by Mr. Ming W. Siu, who has a senior financial industry executive background for 20 years, and is now one of the largest single-sided PCB manufacturers in China. The profit of the circuit board industry is meager, and it is of paramount importance to control costs in order to operate successfully.

In particular, when there are customers who like to purchase PCBs on the basis of per sq meter basis. The price of each piece of PCB is calculated on the basis of the net dimension of that PCB. The traditional practice is for the engineering department to figure out how many pieces each part number can produce on a laminate sheet. If the material utilization rate is low at only 75% to 80%, it is very easily for the manufacturer to lose money on that PCB. To improve the utilization rate, it is necessary to combine different PCBs together in a particular laminate sheet.

However, each order has different part number and ordered quantities, making such calculation of maximizing utilization on each laminate sheet complicated and difficult. From 2018 to 2020, Mr. Siu’s trusted deputy worked around the clock to calculate how to improve the utilization rate. Very often such tasks will not be finished until 3 to 4am which is extremely tiring. Another point is that manual laminate optimization calculation generates lots of restock laminates. Because ordinary people can’t consider 20 different part numbers and different production quantities at the same time, they can then only return the unsuitable laminate size to the warehouse pending future uses, creating piles of restock laminate of varying sizes increasing inventory carrying costs.

Seeing that the company’s scale is growing day by day, it is unrealistic to manually perform the laminate optimization tasks. At the same time, the development of cloud technology and the ability to achieve server less parallelization calculation creates the possibility of performing intense calculations quickly. In 2020, Mr. Siu established Majtech Technology Company Limited (Majtech) in Songshan Lake, a famous technology park in Dongguan, with the goal of launching a cloud based software to help all PCB companies in China more effectively reduce laminate costs, improve their own competitive conditions, and at the same time contribute to the environmental protection benefits.

After the establishment of Majtech it organized a well-known development team from Israel, India, and Germany to develop a cloud-based software. It becomes the world’s first software to be able to automate the placement of working panels on a laminate sheet, enabling the user to achieve the highest utilization with maximum material savings. The software is suitable for single-sided, double-sided, and multi-layer boards manufacturers. At the same time, the trademark “Wise Cut” is officially registered. Such software is also able to perform multi-part number and small-batch calculation for standard working panels which is more intelligent than what is available in the market today.

The birth of “Wise Cut” allows the PCB factories to optimize the laminate sheets regardless of the size of the laminates, and achieve savings between 2%-8% (on average 4%) of laminate costs. With savings in the laminates, PCB factories also save solder mask, etching chemicals and environment recycling costs due to less laminates required to produce the same quantities of PCBs.