At 10:41 PM 1/20/2009, solarwind wrote:

>I wouldn't send it to china anyway if I were you. As soon as you send
>them over, 4 or 5 clones will magically pop up on the market.
>
>--
>solarwind

They do?

Never seen the problem yet with reputable houses. I use 
http://myropcb.com (Chinese with support in Canada) I ordered a 4 
layer board on Jan14th, the five pieces ordered arrived today. So 
that's 5 working days, including shipping and taxes the total was $US 
336. AP Circuits wanted 5 working days plus shipping time - another 2 
days and $US 550 plus shipping and taxes.

One design I did a couple of years back for a client has now passed 
25,000 pieces and no sign of a clone anywhere. Good PCB and assembly 
houses stand to make more profit out of long term relationships 
rather than the short term gain and the loss of a client.

We have had more trouble over the years with Eastern European fab and 
assembly houses and even here in North America we tend to move around 
because we have had issues with several fab & assemble companies 
including one that did a direct knock-off of a product from our 
photo-tools. We found out because our stencils were wearing far too 
quickly - especially the $425 ones we pay for here. Strangely our $85 
Chinese stencils were lasting three to five times as long!

Here in the US and Canada we find that most small to medium sized 
places have products of their own in the marketplace, often directly 
competing with their own clients. We had an instance here in Toronto 
only a few months ago where a fab & assemble house was far too 
interested in our controller design having seen the LED strips it 
controlled. Needless to say we found out they are building LED 
products themselves but don't have a good controller, sorry folks, 
you aren't going to get mine to copy!

John 

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