Board Assembly

Board Assembly

Ways To Lower The Price Of PCB Prototype Assembly

Producing electronic product samples comprises PCB design and PCB assembly and is an important step when launching new products. Based on how far evolved your design is, there is a high risk of expensive errors. I will give some pointers about eliminating common mistakes and how to reduce time to market and expense when making prototypes.

After you have the design for a new product, you want to manufacture a few samples. This will make certain that your device will meet the reliability criteria. Simulating the performance of your product is often completed before starting to build prototypes. Common design software including PCB and industrial design packages will allow you to simulate a variety of performance elements such as electrical, mechanical and thermal performance. Performing simulations will take some extra time. Then again, the results normally will uncover errors in your design. Reducing the quantity of mistakes in your design will simplify attaining the required performance of your prototypes more quickly and in the end save you time.

If you are designing a difficult device, you might want to consider a modular design in which all of the main functions are placed in separate modules. During your testing, you can then switch modules that do not meet the design constraints. When a particular module doesn’t meet the design constraint, it can be replaced relatively quickly. The time advantage at this stage is clear. Throughout the design phase though structuring your design into modules will require additional work.

PCB components are frequently assembled manually during the sample stage although this method is time consuming. Therefore it makes sense considering a contract supplier for the assembly.

To assemble circuit boards, your supplier has to prepare the production line for your board. This step is fairly time consuming in comparison to the manufacturing time in case of prototype runs. Thus you should look for a supplier with a relatively low setup expense since this cost is going to be the bulk of the sample expense. To decrease setup expense of PCB prototype assembly, manufacturers will combine boards from numerous clients. This will split the setup cost amongst a number of customers. As a result, you will only have a limited choice of PCB materials and thicknesses.

Apart from picking a vendor with small setup costs, choosing a company that is going to also be able to handle your full-volume production runs minimizes errors because switching manufacturers has the chance of mistakes as a result of a specific supplier decoding production design data differently. This way your design is already translated into the exact machine files which means little or no setup expense for your finished assembly.

Some PCB vendors also can help you throughout the design by providing in-house PCB design. If you are not very experienced in the design, you may want to consider picking such a vendor. Such a manufacturer can also much more easily and much more quickly solve design-related issues.

A problem with small-quantity manufacturing runs is sourcing of PCB components. Many components vendors will charge freight fees and have minimum order volume requirements for certain components. Small quantities of SMT components are difficult to mount by automatic equipment since they ordinarily do not come in reels. If you select a supplier that has inventory of commonly used SMT parts which you can purchase, you can save a lot of time. Also, you won’t waste any parts which are left over.

It is wise to select a supplier that also can do the manufacturing and testing of the final products. This will save a lot of time during the manufacturing. In addition, defective-product circuit boards can be fixed in house. Decent communications with your supplier is crucial because it will help avoid costly delays and errors during all steps of the PCB assembly and final product manufacturing.

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