Total Assembly

Total Assembly

Methods To Lower The Price Of PCB Prototype Building

Producing electronic product prototypes comprises PCB design and PCB assembly and is an important step when launching new products. Depending on how far evolved your design is, there is a high danger of expensive errors. I will give some advice about eliminating common errors and how to decrease time to market and cost when producing prototypes.

After you have the design for a new product, you want to build a number of prototypes. This will ensure that your device will meet the reliability criteria. Simulating the performance of your product is often completed before starting to manufacture prototypes. Customary design software including PCB and industrial design packages will allow you to simulate various performance elements including electrical, mechanical and thermal performance. Performing simulations will require some extra time. Then again, the results frequently will discover mistakes in your design. Reducing the number of mistakes in your design will simplify achieving the required reliability of your prototypes more quickly and in the end save you time.

One plan to speed up prototype optimization is working with a modular design. A modular design will concentrate key functions of your design in certain parts which are interchangeable. During your prototype optimization you can then rebuild separate modules that do not yet meet your performance requirements as opposed to having to rebuild your entire design. Spinning separate modules will be quicker and more cost effective than spinning a whole design.

Based on the design complexity, you could think about manually assembling PCB components to reduce cost. However, for medium to large complexity this approach tends to be very time consuming, particularly if you want to build a number of prototypes. Thus it makes sense taking into consideration a contract supplier for the assembly.

You should look for a subcontractor which has a low setup cost because this expense is going to dominate the overall cost in case of small-quantity runs. Sample PCB manufacturers usually mix the circuit boards of several customers which essentially shares the setup cost amongst several customers. The drawback is that you will usually only be able to select amongst a number of standard PCB material thicknesses and sizes.

In addition to choosing a manufacturer with small setup costs, choosing a company that will also be able to cope with your full-volume production runs reduces mistakes because changing vendors has the possibility of mistakes resulting from a specific supplier decoding production design data differently. This way your design is already translated into the exact machine data which means small or no setup cost for your final assembly.

Some PCB manufacturers also can assist you during the design by offering in-house PCB design. If you are not very experienced in the design, you may want to consider choosing such a vendor. Such a manufacturer can also much more simply and much more rapidly solve design-related issues.

Buying components for sample runs is a difficulty. Purchasing components in small volume is expensive and requires a lot of effort. Also, a number of suppliers have minimum order quantity requirements. SMT parts are mounted by mounting them as tape in feeders. Mounting small quantities of components though is a challenge since they do not mount in a feeder. If you pick a vendor that has inventory of commonly used SMT components that you can order, you can save a lot of time. Also, you won’t squander any components which are left over.

It is smart to pick a vendor that also can do the assembly and inspecting of the final products. This will save a lot of time during the manufacturing. In addition, defective-product circuit boards can be repaired in house. Lastly, make certain that you are capable to without difficulty communicate with your manufacturer. This will help eliminate costly mistakes and shorten production preparation times throughout all steps of PCB manufacture, PCB assembly and finished product manufacturing.

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