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October, 2016 Production
Why Choosing the Right PCB Vendor is Crucial
By Eric Overtone, CEO, Focus Embedded
FROM YOUR PERSPECTIVE, THIS IS MUCH BIGGER THAN IT LOOKS.
count board shop somewhere, it’s far better to find the competent shop to get a prototype right the first time — saving development money overall, rather than saving a few pennies here and there in the short term. Our design shop at Focus Embedded is capable of circuit design, chip de-
A
sign (FPGA and programmable logic), embedded firmware design, and PCB layout. Because we do such a wide variety of things, we see a very broad array of designs and new product requirements. That obviously filters down into the requirements for PCBs. Every kind
of project from extremely high-speed circuits (requiring time-of-flight analy- ses and impedance matching) to high-power circuits that require heavy cop- per pours and thermal analysis eventually crosses our desks. Much of our work is on standard FR4 boards with fairly basic HASL or
ENIG finish. But some of what we do is well up into the microwave arena, where the substrate may be something more exotic, such as Megtron-6, and the finish may be something less common like immersion silver. We need a seriously competent board shop to build our bare PCBs. And
we depend on having intelligent engineering discussions with the people who are closest to the line — which is something you simply can’t get from most vendors twelve time zones and a language barrier away. What we’ve found over the years is that “saving money” on prototype
printed circuit boards is the ultimate false economy when the $100 not spent at the PCB vendor nets an added requirement for extra hours, days or weeks of engineering debug time spent chasing a PCB fabrication error. We discovered Prototron Cir-
cuits back in 2010 when we were asked to clean up some massive mistakes made by another con- sulting group. True, they had some large holes in their underly- ing hardware and software archi- tectures. And we eventually uncovered some serious circuit errors to go with those. But the single biggest factor preventing them from even starting debug was that they’d tried to build a board with 3/3/3 spacing, buried and blind vias, and a whole lot of impedance control by sending PCB manufacture off- shore to a low bidder. When they plugged the board in and all it did was cause the power supply to fall immediately into “current-limit” mode, they knew they were dead in the water. When we saw it, we went looking for a shop that actually knew what they were doing, which led us to Prototron Circuits. Since then we’ve built dozens of different kinds of PCBs at Prototron —
...it’s never hard to find a deep discount board shop somewhere,
it’s far better to find the competent shop to get a prototype right the first time...
It’s just one small connection. Often smaller than a millimeter wide. But done right, it can save you millions. At Alpha, we place even the smallest electronic assembly challenge in a bigger light. As part of an assembly process that turns particles of material
into products and innovations that
change the world. So when we think of that one connection and how to do it better, we think of where it fits into your business. Because while it may be hard to see, your future success is connected there too.
AlphaAssembly.com
everything from double-sided PCBs running at a few hundred kilohertz to boards with 16 layers, impedance control, time-of-flight restrictions, and top speeds between 20 and 25 GHz. We’ve pulled tens of amperes of current through Prototron Circuits’ PCBs. Never in all that time have we had a single board failure due to bad bare PCB fabrication. So when we go chasing bugs (as we all do on first prototypes), we know we’re chasing engineering design bugs, not manufacturing errors. Today we continue to use Prototron Circuits as our vendor of choice for
every new PCB we produce, and in those instances where we’re only doing PCB layout and our customer asks, “Where do you recommend building these?” we always refer them to Prototron. In fact, our primary CM has also designated them as the “PCB shop of choice” since they’ve never had any board-stuffing problems with Prototron PCBs when they reach the assembly line.
The folks at Prototron building the boards clearly know what they’re
doing, and the people at the front end of the process doing the engineering are all highly knowledgeable and experienced. This makes all the difference in the world when we are doing something unusual or technically challenging and we want feedback from a manufacturer before the design is committed to Ger- ber artwork. At Focus Embedded, we are the people who listen so that we understand
the customer’s idea. We do science in an economic context in order to make money for the customer, and before we start implementing anything, we’ve done the hard math, because we have yet to see anybody who can get away with breaking the laws of physics. Our mission is to get the customer across
the finish line — not to put them on an endless treadmill of “almost there.” Contact: Focus Embedded, 33 Cypress Boulevard, Suite 400, Round
Rock, TX 78665 % 512-246-9012 fax: 512-535-3792 E-mail: info@focusembed-
ded.com Web:
www.focusembedded.com and Prototron Circuits, 15225 NE 95th Street, Redmond, WA 98052 % 425-823-7000 fax: 425-869-2515 E-mail:
info@prototron.com Web:
www.prototron.com r
ll of us have email inboxes full of spam messages that read something like, “Greetings of the day! So glad to know you are desiring to buy PCB’s! We always be with you!” While it’s never hard to find a deep dis-
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