How to Deal with Flexibility

Flexible substrates provide a means of creating thin and light interconnects, and these characteristics make flex circuits ideal for many types of medical devices. Other properties of flex circuits also make them attractive to medical device designers and manufacturers: high routing and packaging capabilities; temperature resistance; better thermal management than PCBs; sturdy circuitry; impedance control; minimal signal loss; and high-speed capability. These advantages come with a number of design and manufacturing challenges, but with demands from the medical device industry for electronics with more functional density and the ability to fit into unusual geometries, there is no shortage of captive and merchant assembly operations working on overcoming those challenges.