News from National Electronics Week
REDUCING THE COST OF PCB DESIGN TO PRODUCTION
With ever increasing demands to reduce time scale and cost of PCB design Oxfordshire based company ALR Services Ltd, have introduced a new Panel Sharing Prototype service ( PSP ) as an aid for PCB designers to achieve just that.
"The concept of the PSP service is to present PCB designers a forum with which they can fully prove their design at a minimum cost." States Jim Rosseter, ALR's Managing Director.
" The cost of the Prototype PCB is reduced by customers sharing space on a larger production panel, thus they pay only for the material utilized by their circuits as opposed to paying for the full area of the production panel. A major advantage to the PCB designers is that when using the PSP service there are no tooling charges involved, so that if changes to a design require two or three sets of prototypes there are considerable cost savings to be made.
As the Chinese manufacturers are becoming more and more competitive on medium sized production runs so the shift from UK manufacturing to China continues. Sourcing PCB's from the far East presents all kinds of potential pitfalls to our UK Buyers, interpretation of data is perhaps the most critical. By using ALR for the prototype of a PCB it allows us to build up an in-depth knowledge of that board from the ground level. When it then comes to sourcing production runs from China , for which we have a number of approved sites to cater for all technological and delivery requirements, we are also able to impart our working knowledge of the PCB to the Chinese manufacturer and present it in such a way as the data will be interpreted correctly. " Continues Jim.
" There are other similar services to our PSP available but we wanted to provide our customers with a prototype board which is a true and complete representation of the final product. With this is mind our PSP service include solder resist, legend and a choice of lead free finishes. Most importantly, all boards supplied on this service will be electronically tested. The feed back we have had from PCB designers has been very positive and we believe that in the current climate this type of service will continue to grow in popularity."
