At 11:25 AM 4/28/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>With reference to the "testing" charge that a lot of PCB houses have as an
>option, I'm wondering what exactly that is.  I've asked and vaguely been told
>that the boards will be electrically tested.

Yes. There's typically both a setup and a piece-part charge for electrical
testing.

>  But if I don't pay the testing
>charge, does this mean that I'm accepting that my boards can be improperly
>constructed with broken traces, etc?

Correct. X% will be bad (open trace hidden under a part, microscopic
shorts, that sort of thing). Testing won't guarantee that the board won't
have gone bad during assembly, but it reduces the problems greatly. The
cost is high enough that for simple boards with cheap or socketed expensive
parts it may be cheaper to throw them away if they don't work.

With testing, you not only don't have to troubleshoot those boards, but
you don't pay for the bad ones in the first place. Theoretically you could
get a credit for bad boards, but I'm not sure it happens that often- you'd
have to narrow it down to the board and not an assembly problem etc., which
is probably more $$ than it is worth.

Best regards,

Spehro Pefhany --"it's the network..."            "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

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