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Manufacturing electronic product samples includes PCB fabrication and PCB assembly and is an important step when launching new products. Depending on how far evolved your design is, there is a high risk of expensive mistakes. I will give some advice about avoiding common errors and how to reduce time to market and cost when manufacturing samples. After you have the design for a new product, you want to manufacture some prototypes. This will guarantee that your product will meet the reliability criteria. Simulating the behavior of your product is often done before starting to build prototypes. Common design software such as PCB and industrial design packages will allow you to simulate different performance aspects such as electrical, mechanical and thermal performance. Running simulations will take some extra time. Then again, the results normally will expose errors in your design. Reducing the number of errors in your design will simplify achieving the required reliability of your samples more rapidly and in the end save you time. If you are designing a difficult device, you may want to think about a modular design in which all of the main features are situated in individual modules. Throughout your testing, you can then replace modules which do not meet the design requirements. Replacing a single module will be relatively cost effective. Moreover, reliability characterization of modules will be faster than classifying the complete design. Because of the setup expense, PCB components are normally assembled manually throughout the prototyping stage. Yet, this method is rather time consuming. One more issue is the lower reliability and quality of manually mounted boards. To get better-quality boards and to avoid problems with particular components which are difficult to mount think about subcontracting the prototype assembly. That may also save you some time. When running small-quantity manufacturing runs, the production setup cost will normally dominate the total sample manufacture cost. When looking for a subcontractor, it is best to choose a supplier which specializes in prototype builds to reduce the expense. Sample PCB manufacturers normally combine the circuit boards of a number of clients which essentially splits the setup expense amongst numerous clients. The downside is that you will usually only be able to select amongst a number of standard PCB material thicknesses and sizes. Seek to pick a supplier that not only has small setup expenses but also can do full-quantity production runs. Specialized prototype assemblers might not be prepared to handle larger volume assembly. This has the advantage of simplifying the migration between sample and finished product. Your vendor may then very easily reuse your translated design data. This might not be the case if you are switching suppliers. Also, chances are that your new vendor will interpret some files in a different way which will risk reliability of the final product. Several PCB suppliers also offer PCB design services which is a great plus in case you don’t have experience with the design. Also, these vendors will be capable to aid you in case there are problems with your design data and be able to spot problems before the manufacturing. One concern with small-quantity assembly runs is purchasing of PCB parts. Most components vendors will charge ship fees and have minimum order quantity requirements for specific components. Small quantities of SMT components are difficult to assemble by automatic machines since they usually do not come in reels. A number of suppliers will stock standard SMT components that you can buy from the supplier. This will save you the time of having to purchase these components independently. Also, you don’t have to be concerned about using up surplus components. Picking a manufacturer that is also capable to do the final product assembly reduces time to market by eliminating ship times between various suppliers. In addition, circuit boards that are found to be defective throughout the final testing can be repaired a great deal more quickly. Lastly, make certain that you are capable to easily communicate with your supplier. This will help eliminate costly mistakes and shorten production preparation times all through all stages of PCB manufacture, PCB assembly and finished product manufacturing.
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