General PCB Manufacturing Pros and Cons

[Probb]

Hey guys,

I've recently partnered up with a buddy that has solid connections to a handful of Chinese fab houses that all make quality boards at a great price.
We're looking to start-up a little website that makes ordering PCB boards quick and painless. Our prices would be right in the ball park of what PCBWay and Dirty PCBs offer, but we don't want our competitive edge to be based solely on price. So, it would be super helpful if all you fine people could give me a little bit of feedback:

• What do you find most frustrating about ordering PCB boards online today?
• What are the major factors that affect your decision with regards to manufacturing your boards (eg: cheapness, quality, customer support, processing speed)?
• What's the typical size of the board you normally order?
• What would be a helpful feature that you would like to see on a PCB order form and/or site?

Any input you guys can provide would be super helpful!
 

[691175002]

I would prefer that they not add text/identifiers to my silkscreen, although I understand that it probably makes the job easier.

[Probb]

The fab houses we work with etch production identifiers into the surface finish of the PCB. You have to make a serious effort to even see them. Otherwise, the board design, specifically the silk screen, is totally un-modified by the manufacturing processes. Is this what you're after?

[ataradov]

What do you find most frustrating about ordering PCB boards online today?

Given how cheap boards are, shipping prices become a significant part of it. So if you can lower that somehow, it would be nice.

What are the major factors that affect your decision with regards to manufacturing your boards (eg: cheapness, quality, customer support, processing speed)?

Price most of the time. I have not had quality problems in recent years.

What's the typical size of the board you normally order?

Up to 10x10 cm.

What would be a helpful feature that you would like to see on a PCB order form and/or site?

OSHPark-like gerber render preview. I use OSHpark for that, even if I don't end up using them for the actual boards.

And yes, visible manufacturing marks are annoying, especially if some surfaces are made to be front panels, and you have to additionally specify where they can and can not place those marks, and then worry if they will screw up.

[mrpackethead]

• What do you find most frustrating about ordering PCB boards online today?

Dealing with any 3rd party that lengthen the supply chain between me and the people actually doing the work.   If there is an issue, i want to hear it first hand, so it can be resolved as fast as possible.

• What are the major factors that affect your decision with regards to manufacturing your boards (eg: cheapness, quality, customer support, processing speed)?

The days of ugly bad quality pcbs are largely gone. this is a commodity item and most do it well enough for the normal run of the mill stuff.   ( FR4 2/4/6/8 layer )...

• What's the typical size of the board you normally order?

typically i'm running boards as panels.    Particaully for the simple stuff that is low cost.  At prototyping stage this lets me not only verify the circuit, but the panels manufuacturablity.   ( you want to make sure all yoru tooling is 100% before you order 500 panels.   I try to keep the panels to smaller than an A4 page.. This makes it workable at paste and assembly.

• What would be a helpful feature that you would like to see on a PCB order form and/or site?

Somethign you might be able to do for the hobby market woudl be to aggregate orders into a weekly shipment and then reship them from your local geography.. But then you limit your self to geopgraphys..

Not wanting to pour cold water on this, but in these speed of internet, highly commodistised markets, you're going to need to come up with somethign pretty special to make your offering attractive.

[Probb]

Great advice,

So, I think what your describing in your suggestion is similar to the OSH Park model, where they collect a bunch of PCB orders and make one big order mashed on a single panel to save everybody money; but you're looking for a more local or hub style to it?

[Cerebus]

• What do you find most frustrating about ordering PCB boards online today?

A complete and clear set of requirements for gerbers. How they expect board outlines, routing lines, v-groove lines to be presented etc. Every low-cost PCB fab I've ever looked at leave this stuff way too vague. Given that one is often relying on someone Chinese's grasp of English it's much better to have clear guidelines on how to present things so that they are interpreted correctly.

• What are the major factors that affect your decision with regards to manufacturing your boards (eg: cheapness, quality, customer support, processing speed)?

Low cost postage options. I'm quite happy to wait for China Post or whatever low cost carrier they use, but I don't want to pay more than I am for the PCBs for express shipping that I don't need and often attracts spurious customs fees and charges on orders that are actually below the customs limits (DHL, TNT all that crowd).

[Probb]

What's everyone's thoughts on an online order form that keeps things as simple as possible. I realize everyone has their own preference with regards to customizing their PCB order to exact specifications, but would you be more inclined to just upload your gerbers (or better yet just your .pcb or .brd files), select your order quantity, and let us handle the rest?
Here's one thing I'm currently brainstorming:
Only manufacture boards that are less than 10x10cm with 1 to 2 layers, green solder mask, HASL lead free surface finish, white silkscreen, 0.6mm thickness, and 1oz copper trace.
If your PCB design is less than or equal to 10x10cm and has no more than 2 layers, and you're cool with the way we manufacture the board (as described above), all you'd have to do is upload your design files.
I'm looking to make this site really fast and easy to use. It's more for the hobbyist who isn't too worried about very detailed board specifications, or the designer that's working through prototypes for a new design that they need to test.

[ataradov]

Only manufacture boards that are less than 10x10cm with 1 to 2 layers, green solder mask, HASL lead free surface finish, white silkscreen, 0.6mm thickness, and 1oz copper trace.

That's exactly what PCBWay is doing for $5/10pcs. How are you going to compete with that? The shipping is $20-30, which is a killer for single orders. So I typically just make 3-5 boards at a time, and then make an order. This requires some non-linear thinking, but generally works.

Ordering process is not particularly hard with any popular PCB manufacturer. I don't think it is such a huge problem to figure out ordering form for a person that figured out EDA package .

[Probb]

Hahaha very true.

[mrpackethead]

Only manufacture boards that are less than 10x10cm with 1 to 2 layers, green solder mask, HASL lead free surface finish, white silkscreen, 0.6mm thickness, and 1oz copper trace.

That's exactly what PCBWay is doing for $5/10pcs. How are you going to compete with that? The shipping is $20-30, which is a killer for single orders. So I typically just make 3-5 boards at a time, and then make an order. This requires some non-linear thinking, but generally works.

Ordering process is not particularly hard with any popular PCB manufacturer. I don't think it is such a huge problem to figure out ordering form for a person that figured out EDA package .

You can nromally also select a lower cost shipping ( china Post ) they just take a while to get to you..   it can be in teh region of $5-10

[jolshefsky]

• What do you find most frustrating about ordering PCB boards online today?
• What are the major factors that affect your decision with regards to manufacturing your boards (eg: cheapness, quality, customer support, processing speed)?
• What's the typical size of the board you normally order?
• What would be a helpful feature that you would like to see on a PCB order form and/or site?

#1 problem is that there is often no information about country-of-manufacture. I know most people only care about price, so I'm the only one who cares about worker rights/safety.

#2 problem is lack of design rules. Track width is nice, but what is the drill size list? How much actual clearance from the edge? What's the feature size on the silkscreen?

I generally order either small-ish boards (around 10cm^2) or very very small boards (<5 cm^2). Price, within reason, has a far lower priority than getting boards back that work. Even though the low-volume stuff is for hobby/prototyping, broken traces and other junk just wastes my time.

[Probb]

Great feedback Jolshefsky,

So, would a page dedicated completely to the manufacturing rules of the fab house be helpful; eg: full list of drill sizes, minimum trace spacing/width, edge clearance, etc.?

[ataradov]

But if you are using a "handful of Chinese fab houses", how do you plan to get all that info and make sure it is consistent?

[janekm]

Frankly, now is a terrible time to try to enter this market as an agent. A few years ago it was quite popular for agents to set up in Shenzhen and offer an interface for International customers to order and pass it on to the local prototyping PCB factories. It made sense because the PCB factories didn't want the hassle of Chinese export regulations (and smaller agents can somewhat skirt around that so long as the volumes aren't too huge).

Now that you have factories offering the service directly like PCBWay brand is doing, there's very little opportunity left. They have located their factory inland for cheaper labour and land prices, and aren't going to be leaving any margin for you. For the moment there's perhaps still the DHL fee (which would be really hard for you to work around) but there are already shipment consolidation services that can get that cost down, so there's room for PCBWay to get prices on shipping down easier than for you.

[Probb]

Ataradov,
We've built a network with a handful of Chinese fab houses, but once we've built a solid business model, we'll only be working with one house that suits our model best.

Janekm,
Great feedback. I realize when it comes to price, it's going to be next to impossible to beat out the big players. That's why I'm trying to get a little more information with regards to what these guys might be missing or what could be added to make the overall experience of ordering PCBs more enjoyable, if that's possible haha.

[Harvs]

What I really want out of a PCB fab now is to have somewhere that I could build a working relationship with to reliably get the outcome I need.

I do a lot of design to final prototype stage as a contractor for other companies that handle their production.  I'm not ordering bargain priced boards, usually it's either 2-layer boards with fast turn or spec'd up multi-layer boards.

So what I am finding a problem is Chinese boards housing screwing orders up.  It's like every third or forth order they do something stupid, some examples:
- Just last week PCBway failed to ship an urgent 24hr turn board for 72hrs.  They didn't tell me about it until I wrote to them after seeing the DHL date, then they said they were one board short on an order of 50, so instead of sending them (which would have been ok) they added the extra board to another slower run then sent them all three days later!  They then offered to refund the 24hr turn fee only (to me this seems like a calculated decision rather than a genuine mistake.)

- I had an order for 5 reasonable sized 6 layer boards from PCBCart. They came with solder mask imperfections and bent in all sorts of weird ways.  I asked about why they were bent because it made soldering a large BGA a problem. They claimed it was my design that was the problem (which is fine if it is) but then refused to tell me what was wrong with my design and would only give general completely useless advice despite multiple emails.  Most likely it was some other designs in the panel that caused the issue but they didn't want to admit it.

I could go on and on with examples from several large board houses but I'm not just trying to have a rant.  The market segment I'm missing is something between the very high prices of western board houses and the lack of reliability from Chinese board houses.

[ChristopherN]

What do you find most frustrating about ordering PCB boards online today?

I usually order boards that I need quick. It sucks that many pcb houses lie about the actual delivery time to my door (which is what I care about). I usually don't care if the board or shipping is a few bucks more or less.
An example: 10 pcbs, 100x100mm:
Multi Circuit Boards: 2 days production + 1day shipping: 250€ (and they hold their promise).
PCBway: 24h production (which can be higher due to the weird order process and manual check they do) + DHL Express (up to 3 days) from China to Germany: $62

I would happily pay 120€ to get the boards in 3 days.

Another big plus would be to be able to use files directly out of Circuit Studio or Eagle. And it would be nice to get pictures of your pcbs in the production process as some other pcb houses offer.

What are the major factors that affect your decision with regards to manufacturing your boards (eg: cheapness, quality, customer support, processing speed)?

Speed and ease to order.

What's the typical size of the board you normally order?

Min 8*12mm (in a panel with tabs), max 200*200mm

What would be a helpful feature that you would like to see on a PCB order form and/or site?

Direct cad imports from CircuitStudio and Eagle.
Photos from production.
Stencils.
Real invoices that match the local regulations of customers.
Honest customs forms.
Good packaging, had a bent stencil once.
More payment options (PayPal!).
More high-end shipment options, there are different classes in express shipping.
More languages on the web interface.
Specifications for the materials used (MSDS!)

I guess my requirements are a bit on the demanding side and not at all easy to solve, but I think that there is a market "in the middle".

[alexanderbrevig]

Clear DFM rules.
Clear and sensible gerber rules.
Online gerber viewer (absolute final inspection, more than once have I found a revision silk marker needs an update ).
Ability to order stencils.
For me I would like a sane price between ten and a thousand pieces.
Sane defaults. Once I got brown on black without changing any colors.
Let me know of you det something up. I'll try it!

[jolshefsky]

Great feedback Jolshefsky,

So, would a page dedicated completely to the manufacturing rules of the fab house be helpful; eg: full list of drill sizes, minimum trace spacing/width, edge clearance, etc.?

For production, I have stuck with Advanced Circuits. Their specifications page (including the "full list") is more than complete, including specs I don't even know what they mean.

Even they don't specify the drill sizes which was annoying when I wanted a plated hole for press-fit: Mill-Max says they want a 0.026" (0.66mm) hole (without tolerances which I take to be ±0.001" (±0.03mm) or so). Advanced Circuits says ±0.003" (±0.08 mm) typical (they recently added ±0.002" (±0.05mm) for press-fit applications) but even at the best, that's a big ±8% error. I decided to put in two holes to mitigate risk: 0.026" (0.66mm) and 0.025" (0.64mm) which actually get manufactured different sizes. I'd rather not guess whether they are using 0.026" and 0.025" drills, or 0.7mm and 0.6mm drills, or laser-cutting the small holes.

Unrelated to that, I do think there is space in the market for small runs of higher-than-hobby quality. Sometimes I'll need 100 small boards for a "run", but with a setup cost of $400, the boards are practically free so I end up buying 400 instead.

[ansonbao]

- Just last week PCBway failed to ship an urgent 24hr turn board for 72hrs. 

We have noticed this problem and are working on it,thanks for your feedback.

[Probb]

This is all great feedback guys! Really appreciating it.

[free_electron]

here is what i often find lacking

- 10 mil drill
- 5 mil track and gap or even 4 mil track and gap
- milled slots ( especially for those DC jack lugs.)

the ability to order the entire panel. or two half panels or 4 quarter. ( a panel is a bit big for shipping ... )

the idea is : you give me a working area. inside this area i am allowed to do whatever  i want. this area is placed 2 times on a panel or 4 times on a panel( typically 18 by 24)
i receive my design milled to the working area.

this allows me to send boards through a pick and place as a panel (opposed to little thingies that are hard for the line to handle )

[Probb]

How many of you guys prefer panelizing your designs versus ordering independent boards?

[ChristopherN]

Depends on the board size and everything that follows. I order small boards as panel, it would be a pain to handle small boards alone. I usually don't care for larger boards (starting from 5x5cm), but I mainly do very small runs and hand assembly.

Another service that would be nice is to be able to let you put QR-/Barcode stickers (with my content / code) on each board.