Manufacturing electronic product prototypes includes
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 risk of costly mistakes. I will give some advice about avoiding common mistakes and how to minimize time to market and cost when manufacturing prototypes.
After you have the design for a new product, you want to build some prototypes. This will ensure that your product will meet the performance 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 various performance aspects such as electrical, mechanical and thermal performance. Running simulations will take some extra time. However, the results often will uncover mistakes in your design. Minimizing the number of mistakes in your design will simplify achieving the required performance of your prototypes more quickly and in the end save you time.
If you are designing a complex product, you may want to consider a modular design in which all of the main functions are located in individual modules. During your testing, you can then swap modules which do not meet the design constraints. Spinning individual modules will be quicker and more cost effective than spinning a whole design.
Depending on the design complexity, you could consider manually mounting PCB components to save cost. However, for medium to large complexity this method tends to be extremely time consuming, especially if you want to build several prototypes. Therefore it makes sense considering a contract manufacturer for the assembly.
To mount circuit boards, your vendor has to prepare the production line for your board. This step is fairly time consuming in comparison to the assembly time in case of prototype runs. Therefore you should look for a supplier with a relatively low setup cost since this cost will be the majority of the prototyping cost. To reduce setup cost of PCB prototype manufacturing, vendors will combine boards from several customers. This will distribute the setup cost amongst several customers. As a result, you will only have a limited selection of PCB materials and thicknesses.
Aside from selecting a supplier with low setup costs, picking a company that will also be able to handle your full-volume production runs minimizes mistakes since switching manufacturers has the chance of mistakes due to a particular supplier interpreting production design data differently. This way your design is already translated into the specific machine data which means little or no setup cost for your final production.
A PCB contract manufacturer that also offers PCB design services will be able to assist you in the design process and also be able to much more easily resolve design-related problems.
One problem with small-quantity production runs is sourcing of PCB components. Most components vendors will charge ship fees and have minimum order quantity requirements for certain components. Also, dealing with a small quantity of components is a problem in case of surface mount assembly since components will be mounted from SMT feeders. Some manufacturers will stock standard SMT components that you can purchase from the vendor. This will save you the time of having to purchase these components individually. Also, you don't have to worry about using up leftover components.
It is smart to pick a vendor that also can do the assembly and testing of the finished products. This will save a lot of time during the assembly. Also, defective-product circuit boards can be repaired in house. Make sure you can easily and effectively communicate with your vendor. Also, make sure that your vendor can identify with your concerns. This ability will be key in avoiding costly delays and mistakes of the PCB assembly and final product manufacturing.
