Shout It Loud

I will give some advice about eliminating costly errors while running sample product and PCB manufacturing and how to decrease time to market for new electronic products.

After you have the design for a new product, you want to manufacture a few samples. This will ensure that your product will meet the reliability criteria. Simulating the behavior of your product is often done before starting to assemble prototypes. General design software such as PCB and industrial design packages will allow you to simulate a variety of performance aspects such as electrical, mechanical and thermal performance. Doing a simulation allows reducing the number of design mistakes before the initial prototype is built.

One plan to speed up prototype optimization is working with a modular design. A modular design will concentrate core functions of your design in particular parts which are interchangeable. Throughout your prototype optimization you can then rebuild separate modules that do not yet meet your performance constraints rather than having to rebuild your whole design. Spinning separate modules will be faster and more cost effective than spinning a whole design.

As a result of the setup expense, PCB parts are often mounted by hand throughout the prototyping phase. However, this approach is quite time consuming. One more concern is the lower reliability and quality of manually assembled boards. Subcontracting the prototype assembly offers higher quality. It can also save a lot of time.

When doing small-quantity production runs, the production setup cost is going to typically dominate the total sample build expense. When looking for a subcontractor, it is best to choose a supplier which specializes in sample builds to reduce the cost. Because prototype PCB manufacturers mix boards from a number of customers, you will generally only have a limited selection of board materials and thicknesses when using a PCB sampling service.

In addition to selecting a vendor with small setup expenses, picking a company that is going to also be able to handle your full-volume assembly runs reduces mistakes since changing manufacturers has the possibility of mistakes as a consequence of a particular vendor decoding production design files differently. Your supplier can then very easily reuse your translated design files. This may not be the case if you are changing manufacturers. Also, chances are that your new vendor will interpret some files differently which will jeopardize performance of the finished product.

A number of PCB manufacturers also can aid you throughout the design by offering in-house PCB design. If you are not very experienced in the design, you may want to think about selecting such a vendor. Such a vendor can also much more easily and much more rapidly resolve design-related difficulties.

Sourcing components for sample runs is a problem. Purchasing parts in small quantities is expensive and involves a lot of work. In addition, some vendors have minimum order quantity constraints. Small quantities of SMT components are difficult to mount by automatic machines because they normally do not come in reels. Some suppliers carry stock of commonly used SMT parts which you can purchase which will save you the time of buying these parts yourself and also eliminates wasting unused components.

If you picked a supplier that also does the finished product assembly, you will not only save time to market but also guarantee that circuit boards that are found to be faulty during the final test will be fixed much more rapidly. Be sure you can without difficulty and effectively communicate with your vendor. In addition, ensure that your supplier can identify with your concerns. This ability will be crucial in avoiding costly delays and mistakes of the PCB assembly and final product assembly.