Mass Production of your PCB: Designing in low costs

For anyone that has ever opened that back of a television set, you'll notice a LOT of dust. Besides this, to the trained eye you'll see a very simple PCB. There are reasons for this, and it makes sense too.

During any product development stage, in any R&D department, in any company, you'll have a team of design engineers. Their job is to design a product that does whatever they were hired to create. But, what has long been forgotten in this day and age, is not only are engineers required to have knowledge of electronics and PCB layout, but they also need the mentality of a penny pincher, and pennies really do count.

For example, lets take a design engineer that wants to develop a PCB design, and the component he picks in one particular spot in the circuit calls for a capacitor of 22uF. Now, the first thought is to grab a Tantalum capacitor as they are the most reliable, longer life span, and overall much better quality. However, what he should have picked is an electrolytic. These capacitors are cheaper and have a lower quality. Surely I'm backwards here ...Right? So why should he have picked the lower quality part? This engineer first of all, should have designed the circuit around that capacitor to deal with variations in the capacitor (These variations could mean that this capacitor loses 20% of it's value after 10 years). And if the circuit is capable of dealing with this loss, there's no problem. After placing this cheaper capacitor on his PCB design, he'll send it over to manufacturing and they'll build about 1 million of these units. Now while the price he saved switching from a tantalum to an electrolytic was about 15 cents. He might have 3 per PCB, for a cost savings of 45 cents per board. Multiply that by 1 million, and that's a savings of $450,000. Another quick example is the iPhone... I believe they build over 50 million units. Can you imagine what 1 cent per phone could be worth? If you were the developer, would you not spend the extra time trying to shave off just 1 cent to have that cent turn into $500,000? Even better yet, what if you had 4 resistors that you condensed into a 4-pack resistor for a savings of 0 cents (zero cents), but the cost of placing those 4 resistors onto the PCB during manufacturing was 0.25 cents more than placing just 1 R-pack... and that board had 20 R-packs. That's a savings of 5 cents per PCB! The term "A penny for your thoughts" becomes more relevant doesn't it?

This savings that the design engineer created will go directly into an employee fund to help with the end of year Christmas events, or, it might go directly toward getting the CEO that new yacht he's been eyeing. Whatever the result, I wouldn't place any bets on the prior.

Now, before I get everyone upset about cheaply made junk, let me try to and salvage my reputation. For a mass produced PCB design, this might be o.k. But, if you're developing a PCB that you want to stand out as a top contender, you should put these better quality components into on your PCB design. The difference between the better made PCB and the cheaper one is subtle, yet a lot at the same time. With any mass produced product, you have 'accepted failure rates'. I've seen them as his as 3%, meaning for every product a company ships out, its' acceptable for 3% of them to fail under the factory warranty period. After this period expires, they don't care what happens. This is horrible in my book (The x-box 360 comes to mind, because when it first came out, they were seeing an unintended 20% failure rate simply from bad design practices due to thermal issues from the core processor).

But, if you want a 99.999% success rate, and still have this same piece of equipment last for 50 years, you develop with quality parts and have a quality PCB design. And in the end, what happens is customers recognize the company name brand as something they can rely on through and through. This could make up for any lost saving in the beginning, as you get the rewards from loyal customers in the years to come.

Incidentally, PCB Experts looks at every trade off made. It's our firm belief that the environment should fit the PCB design. If it's to be put into a 4x4 truck, it should withstand grease, mud, water, shock and temperature extremes. You won't get that with any over the counter part.

 

PCB Experts can deliver great prices for your PCB mass production needs. We also offer an exceptionally priced assembly service. With our numerious PCB services that we provide, you can't go wrong. Please contact us today for a Mass PCB Production quote.