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Methods To Reduce The Cost Of PCB Prototype Making
Getting your new electronic product design prepared for mass production and PCB assembly entails numerous steps and challenges. I will give some recommendations about how to eliminate expensive mistakes and how to reduce the time to market for your new product designs.
After you have the design for a new product, you want to build a few samples. This will make sure that your device will meet the performance criteria. Simulating the behavior of your product is normally done before starting to assemble prototypes. Common design software such as PCB and industrial design packages will allow you to simulate various performance aspects including electrical, mechanical and thermal performance. Performing simulations will take some extra time. Then again, the results often will uncover errors in your design. Reducing the amount of errors in your design will simplify attaining the needed reliability of your samples more quickly plus in the end save you time.
If you are designing a complicated product, you may want to consider a modular design in which every one of the main functions are located in individual modules. During your testing, you can then replace modules which do not meet the design constraints. When a specific module doesn't meet the design constraint, it can be replaced relatively quickly. The time benefit at this stage is apparent. During the design stage though structuring your design into modules will take additional effort.
PCB components are often assembled by hand during the sample phase even though this option is time consuming. Therefore it makes sense considering a contract supplier for the assembly.
When doing small-quantity production runs, the production setup cost will typically dominate the total sample build expense. When looking for a subcontractor, it is best to choose a vendor that specializes in sample builds to reduce the cost. To lower setup expense of PCB prototype manufacturing, suppliers will combine boards from a number of clients. This will distribute the setup expense amongst a number of customers. Consequently, you will only have a limited choice of PCB materials and thicknesses.
Apart from selecting a vendor with small setup expenses, picking a company that is going to also be able to cope with your full-volume manufacturing runs minimizes errors since switching suppliers has the chance of errors due to a specific manufacturer decoding production design data in a different way. This way your design is already translated into the exact machine data which means little or no setup cost for your finished assembly.
A few PCB manufacturers also can help you during the design by providing in-house PCB design. If you are not very experienced in the design, you might want to consider choosing such a supplier. Such a vendor can also a great deal more easily and much more rapidly solve design-related difficulties.
A concern with small-quantity manufacturing runs is purchasing of PCB parts. Most components suppliers will charge ship fees and have minimum order volume requirements for certain parts. Small quantities of SMT components are hard to mount by automatic machines since they normally do not come in reels. Several suppliers will stock standard SMT components that you can purchase from the vendor. This will save you the time of having to order these components independently. In addition, you don’t have to worry about using up leftover components.
If you picked a supplier that also does the finished product manufacturing, you will not only reduce time to market but also ensure that circuit boards that are found to be faulty during the final inspection will be fixed much more rapidly. Be sure you can easily and efficiently converse with your vendor. Also, be sure that your supplier can identify with your issues. This ability will be key in eliminating expensive delays and mistakes of the PCB assembly and finished product manufacturing.
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