At 10:10 AM 1/3/2009, Olin Lathrop wrote: >Forrest Christian wrote: > > For a typical job around here which includes 60 smd placements, 1 fine > > pitch placement, and 3 through hole components, I'm getting a average > > cost on production runs of around $20/board. > >That sounds very high. Do a layout and BOM for a representative SMD board >and have Djula quote it. I suspect getting your own equipment won't make >sense any more. Yes, extremely high. Recently I had 200 pieces of a PCB fabricated and assembled by a company I use in China. The PCB is about 2.25 x 2.75 inches, double sided. 60 SMD placements, 2 fine pitch, 1 TQFP, 9 PTH parts. We supply gerbers and parts kit. They send back finished boards individually packaged with antistatic foam in a shielded bag, then packed in boxes. Cost of production (first run so includes stencil and programming) $4.465 each Repeat run would be around $3.25 each Shipping for 10kg from China to Toronto, Canada was $210. So our total was $5.51 plus parts. End to end turnaround was about 145 days from gerbers to boards on my desk. So $20 you are being quoted is closer to a hand assembly price. If I was doing 1000 piece lots I would probably get them done here, the differential is far less. I have friends who have SMD lines, but even on "mates rates" they can't compete at the 100 to 200 piece level. One even recently sold his entire line, it was costing him too much to run, for 100-200 piece runs he was getting about 6 day turn-around (assuming he already had stencils) and a finished cost between 5 and 10 times what I had been paying in China. By the time he added the things you don't think of. Solder paste, stencils, wastage, stencil damage, paste printer clean-up, placement set-up time, programming time, oven maintenance, dry-out facilities for parts prior to placement, board pre-heater and cool down racks, inspection costs, reflow oven maintenance. Not to mention as some one else has said here, the loss of your own productive time. My $job is in an organisation makes some reasonably high-tech gear, we don't own any SMT assembly gear other than for manual assembly in the lab. When I went there I was a little surprised. But by the time the manufacturing engineers gave me the run-down, I agreed, let the specialists do it. I nearly forgot to mention that the above prices include flying probe inspection of the bare boards, AOI (automated optical inspection) on the loaded boards, and x-ray to check solder joints even though we don't use any QFN or BGA parts on that board, it is all done automatically. Regards, John >******************************************************************** >Embed Inc, Littleton Massachusetts, http://www.embedinc.com/products >(978) 742-9014. Gold level PIC consultants since 2000. >-- >http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive >View/change your membership options at >http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist > > >-- >No virus found in this incoming message. >Checked by AVG. >Version: 7.5.552 / Virus Database: 270.10.2/1872 - Release Date: >1/2/2009 1:10 PM -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist