hey guys, I'm designing some medical equipment here at work, and after I refine my prototype, I'll need to get some custom printed circuitboards, or even better, completed custom circuitboards. anyone have any suggestions where I can go to source a small production run from? (first run would only be like 20 pieces. so its a pretty small order to begin with)...price is important, I MIGHT have to pay for the first run out of pocket until I can get the higher up management people on board.

When I was a Test Engineer at Jabil circuit, Inc. I used to use:

http://www.pcbexpress.com/products/index.php?gclid=CJmJtY3moqQCFRD75wodDG2a4w

or

http://www.expresspcb.com/

Any small volumes or prototypes are expensive.

oh, those aren't too bad, I just didn't want it to end up being like $2000 or something, a few hundred I can handle and save up for if needed.

did they have pretty good service and quality?

The company I work for uses this company for supply of printed circuit boards of various types and sizes.

http://www.oes-inc.com/

Good guys with pretty damn good support too

Advertisers on electronic hobby mag:

http://www.pcbnet.com/newcustomeroffer.asp

Mag:

http://www.elektor.com/

Aloicious wrote:

oh, those aren't too bad, I just didn't want it to end up being like $2000 or something, a few hundred I can handle and save up for if needed.

did they have pretty good service and quality?

Both have great service and the quality was excellent. I used PCB Express quite often for custom interface boards in test equipment. Wish I was still in the field, I miss it terribly.

smgoodguy wrote:

When I was a Test Engineer at Jabil circuit, Inc. I used to use:

http://www.pcbexpress.com/products/index.php?gclid=CJmJtY3moqQCFRD75wodDG2a4w

or

http://www.expresspcb.com/

Any small volumes or prototypes are expensive.

+1 for both of these

If you guys don't mind, please post more info on this.

Used to be a PCB designer and even did the 2x manual tape art work.

There used to be tons of tiny custom, short run shops all over the place
in the SF Bayarea. Wonder how many are still around. Haven't touched
this stuff since the early 80's.

Advice from decades old info/background.

Depends on the complexity of your board. How many layers, how many via's
(worse if buried via's), how fine are the traces and spacing, all signal level or
are you mixing power and on power...how high amp/volts, etc.

Check with your ops folks and ask if they will give you the phone numbers and
contacts that they use.

Some times, the production shops will have a proto-type line and have excess
capacity there and some times on the production line that they will use 'if' you
convince them that they might get the production run or allowed to bid.

You guys worked at Jabil in the early mid 90's or were you guys still in diapers...

Jabil was my production line for controllers based on Sun's that my team redesigned
and packaged as embedded controllers. Mainly Xerox and Kodak industrial
printers (phone bill, power bill, credit card bill, etc). After Sun's internal production
line wouldn't even quote my $200M/year contract from each. Jabil at Jackson, Florida
and used to play volleyball with them between meetings.

Not too far from diapers in the early 90s

ExpressPCB has free CAD software that's pretty easy to use for layout. Transmits the design straight to them for processing. They are fast and cheap. Especially cheap if you use one of their package deals with a predefined set of limitations on board area and # of layers. If you don't need solder mask, you'll save too.

Be sure to keep an eye on their specific guidelines for layout, in addition to general PCB layout best practices.

Bent1 wrote:

If you guys don't mind, please post more info on this.

Used to be a PCB designer and even did the 2x manual tape art work.

There used to be tons of tiny custom, short run shops all over the place
in the SF Bayarea. Wonder how many are still around. Haven't touched
this stuff since the early 80's.

Advice from decades old info/background.

Depends on the complexity of your board. How many layers, how many via's
(worse if buried via's), how fine are the traces and spacing, all signal level or
are you mixing power and on power...how high amp/volts, etc.

Check with your ops folks and ask if they will give you the phone numbers and
contacts that they use.

Some times, the production shops will have a proto-type line and have excess
capacity there and some times on the production line that they will use 'if' you
convince them that they might get the production run or allowed to bid.

You guys worked at Jabil in the early mid 90's or were you guys still in diapers...

Jabil was my production line for controllers based on Sun's that my team redesigned
and packaged as embedded controllers. Mainly Xerox and Kodak industrial
printers (phone bill, power bill, credit card bill, etc). After Sun's internal production
line wouldn't even quote my $200M/year contract from each. Jabil at Jackson, Florida
and used to play volleyball with them between meetings.

I worked at Jabil from 1989 to 2003(was laid off due to them offshoring most of their work to lower cost facilities in Mexico, China, etc.). I worked at their Michigan facilities. I was indeed working there during the Sun days. The project started out in their St. Petersburg, Florida facility, but we transferred it all to Michigan. I did quite a bit of Diagnostic Tech, Test Tech and Test Engineering(functional and environmental stress screening.) work on the Sun project. I went to Sun in San Jose twice for training, once for Solaris admin and once for some functional ESS development work. The controller boards in the printers you mentioned were basically main boards for Sun Sparcstations, We also did numerous I/O boards for the Sparcstations(graphics adapters, etc.) and various boards for the larger Sunservers. I remember unending grief with the wirebonding of the Sparc processor(you guys called it the Tsunami, basically an unencapsulated chip) to the board. Florida just couldn't get it right, that's one of the main reasons we transferred it it to Michigan, we were better at it. Our Project Manager and manufacturing department got way too overzealous and repeatedly tried telling Sun how to design and build their products, against my urging to not do so. Jabil wanted to make it cheaper and easier to manufacture, Sun wanted high quality and reliability. This dispute is what led to Sun leaving us and going elsewhere. Shame, it was the coolest project we ever did in my opinion. Anyways, as for doing small runs or prototypes, Jabil will not do them unless there is a commitment to volume production down the road. We at one time had a small protyping facility in San Jose, which we tried expanding to volume production, and when that went bust, we closed the whole thing down. They wouldn't even do small runs of test boards or interface boards for our own test equipment, we went to PCBExpress for those most of the time. As a general rule, we didn't fab bare PCBs, we outsourced them, we did the population/stuffing/assembly and test.

its a pretty simple circuit, all run off a 3V DC Watch battery, so current and such is very minimal. its not very complex either, 2 layers MAX. board size is small, I'd like as small as I can get, but it'll probably end up between 1" square and 1"x2". working on the proto-board test this week and going to do some refining of the design before I actually design the board. I like the PCBexpress options and software but their 'miniboard' cheap option is too big a board. I also found a screamin' deal at this place: http://www.sunstone.com/pcb123.aspx seems simmilar to PCB express but a little more flexable with their prototyping stuff and looks like I could get a run of around 20-25 for under $200, which would be great.

I'd have to assemble them myself which is easy enough, but I'm looking at surface mount IC's, R's, C's, and Op amps. the problem is I've never soldered a surface mount one before. doesn't look too hard. but I doubt my simple soldering gun would do the trick. any suggestions on a good soldering setup for surface mount stuff?

Aloicious wrote:

its a pretty simple circuit, all run off a 3V DC Watch battery, so current and such is very minimal. its not very complex either, 2 layers MAX. board size is small, I'd like as small as I can get, but it'll probably end up between 1" square and 1"x2". working on the proto-board test this week and going to do some refining of the design before I actually design the board. I like the PCBexpress options and software but their 'miniboard' cheap option is too big a board. I also found a screamin' deal at this place: http://www.sunstone.com/pcb123.aspx seems simmilar to PCB express but a little more flexable with their prototyping stuff and looks like I could get a run of around 20-25 for under $200, which would be great.

I'd have to assemble them myself which is easy enough, but I'm looking at surface mount IC's, R's, C's, and Op amps. the problem is I've never soldered a surface mount one before. doesn't look too hard. but I doubt my simple soldering gun would do the trick. any suggestions on a good soldering setup for surface mount stuff?

You can use a reflow process with paste solder and a toaster oven for heat. Apply the solder to the pads, place the parts, heat, cool. Your component datasheets will have reflow specs in them.

Failing that, a good soldering iron, stereoscope, and a steady hand will do it. But that's definitely not a production-suited process. Rework and prototyping only. Flux your surfaces well.

smgoodguy wrote:

snip...

I worked at Jabil from 1989 to 2003(was laid off due to them offshoring most of their work to lower cost facilities in Mexico, China, etc.). I worked at their Michigan facilities. I was indeed working there during the Sun days. The project started out in their St. Petersburg, Florida facility, but we transferred it all to Michigan. I did quite a bit of Diagnostic Tech, Test Tech and Test Engineering(functional and environmental stress screening.) work on the Sun project. I went to Sun in San Jose twice for training, once for Solaris admin and once for some functional ESS development work. The controller boards in the printers you mentioned were basically main boards for Sun Sparcstations, We also did numerous I/O boards for the Sparcstations(graphics adapters, etc.) and various boards for the larger Sunservers. I remember unending grief with the wirebonding of the Sparc processor(you guys called it the Tsunami, basically an unencapsulated chip) to the board. Florida just couldn't get it right, that's one of the main reasons we transferred it it to Michigan, we were better at it. Our Project Manager and manufacturing department got way too overzealous and repeatedly tried telling Sun how to design and build their products, against my urging to not do so. Jabil wanted to make it cheaper and easier to manufacture, Sun wanted high quality and reliability. This dispute is what led to Sun leaving us and going elsewhere. Shame, it was the coolest project we ever did in my opinion. Anyways, as for doing small runs or prototypes, Jabil will not do them unless there is a commitment to volume production down the road. We at one time had a small protyping facility in San Jose, which we tried expanding to volume production, and when that went bust, we closed the whole thing down. They wouldn't even do small runs of test boards or interface boards for our own test equipment, we went to PCBExpress for those most of the time. As a general rule, we didn't fab bare PCBs, we outsourced them, we did the population/stuffing/assembly and test.

Extremely small world, as that was my program and basis for both getting passed over and promotion to corporate
Strategy and Planning

Had over $500M in contracts with both Kodak and Xerox. $100M first year from one, $200M first year from second one.
Rochester NY was their HQ and used to call them 'The East River guys' and the 'West River guys'.

Passed over because those contracts were the basis for our silicone division, SparcTech. Passed over because I also
had other SAMs (Fujitsu, Hitachi, SamSung, Philips med, GE med, etc). That new GM ruined that division and those
contracts.

Was aware of the mess Jabil was going through and know that Project Manager as used to play volleyball with that
whole group during lunch (great that they had an indoor court in the facility). Flew into Jacksonville and drove over
the bay.

Tsunami and that whole chip set broke many ground rules. That design team one of the best, but 'east coast' division,
therefore not as good as the folks out here in the West Coast (baloney I used to say and part of why management
didn't like my mouth).

There were follow on projects and programs with Kodak, Xerox and others (Adobe, if you can believe that as they
'were' considering hardware/systems at that time).

Yeah, fun stuff and one of my favorite jobs and miss that badly...living vicariously through you guys on that...

Another approach for such a small or uncomplicated board (2 sided and small) is to wire wrap it...if that
is still supported.

Not a good thing for longevity, nor reliability, but for quick prototypes, can't be beat.

Don't know if the components are still available or not, but do a search. key will be the
chip carriers, as the new stuff is too dense to have wire wrap posts and still have enough
room to get the wrapping tool/gun in there.

Oh man, memories !!!!

Told to keep out of those programs after moved over to corporate, but my teams kept me in touch
and Kodak/Xerox continued to call/email for advice.

They only wanted the embedded board (the mother board of a Sun) and the Faraday cage
changes necessary to keep up with the chip rev's drove them nuts.

Told them to consider buying the Sun box and just turn their Faraday cage into a shelf.

Funny is that the Sun Box cost almost as much as the embedded board and made
that Sun Salesman tons of money. I got some options, as broke the rules talking to
a customer directly when Sales and the Design Team were supposed to.

Win/Win as it cost them less and gave Sun more revenue/profit.

There were two SunU campuses. One in Sunnyvale in the SPARC division. Other
in Milpitas, which was the big one with everything there (IIRC 4 buildings)

PSWired wrote:

Aloicious wrote:

its a pretty simple circuit, all run off a 3V DC Watch battery, so current and such is very minimal. its not very complex either, 2 layers MAX. board size is small, I'd like as small as I can get, but it'll probably end up between 1" square and 1"x2". working on the proto-board test this week and going to do some refining of the design before I actually design the board. I like the PCBexpress options and software but their 'miniboard' cheap option is too big a board. I also found a screamin' deal at this place: http://www.sunstone.com/pcb123.aspx seems simmilar to PCB express but a little more flexable with their prototyping stuff and looks like I could get a run of around 20-25 for under $200, which would be great.

I'd have to assemble them myself which is easy enough, but I'm looking at surface mount IC's, R's, C's, and Op amps. the problem is I've never soldered a surface mount one before. doesn't look too hard. but I doubt my simple soldering gun would do the trick. any suggestions on a good soldering setup for surface mount stuff?

You can use a reflow process with paste solder and a toaster oven for heat. Apply the solder to the pads, place the parts, heat, cool. Your component datasheets will have reflow specs in them.

Failing that, a good soldering iron, stereoscope, and a steady hand will do it. But that's definitely not a production-suited process. Rework and prototyping only. Flux your surfaces well.

Depending on the pitch or spacing of the leads on the SMT devices, pasting the board may be difficult without a screen or stencil. Not sure I'd want to use that toaster oven for food afterwards, lots of nasty fumes. I have done a lot of hand soldering of SMT, and a good soldering iron with a very narrow pencil tip will work. If you have good eyes and the pitch or spacing of the leads are not to fine, you may be able to do it without a scope or magnifier, in any event the resistors and capacitors shouldn't be a problem. At Jabil, we used Metcal benchtop soldering stations for all the hand work, excellent equipment, but very expensive. A stereoscope or lighted magnifier is the best way to see what you're doing. As was stated, use plenty of flux, and with surface mount, you put the solder on the pads before the component, then place the component and reflow the solder.

http://www.metcal.com/

Bent1 wrote:

Oh man, memories !!!!

Told to keep out of those programs after moved over to corporate, but my teams kept me in touch
and Kodak/Xerox continued to call/email for advice.

They only wanted the embedded board (the mother board of a Sun) and the Faraday cage
changes necessary to keep up with the chip rev's drove them nuts.

Told them to consider buying the Sun box and just turn their Faraday cage into a shelf.

Funny is that the Sun Box cost almost as much as the embedded board and made
that Sun Salesman tons of money. I got some options, as broke the rules talking to
a customer directly when Sales and the Design Team were supposed to.

Win/Win as it cost them less and gave Sun more revenue/profit.

There were two SunU campuses. One in Sunnyvale in the SPARC division. Other
in Milpitas, which was the big one with everything there (IIRC 4 buildings)

Not sure who the project manager was when it was being done in Florida, it got a new one when it came to Michigan, a woman(not bad looking) that was at one time our plant manger(the best one we ever had, and we had many), then moved to project management because it paid better. Long story behind her career path from buyer to being fired, to plant manager to project manager, I'm sure you can figure it out. Regardless of how she got there, she was good at her job.

The owner of the company moved to Florida and was a raquetball fan, that's how the indoor raquetball/volleyball court got put in the plant, then when we built a new plant in Michigan, we got one there as well. They are nice if you use them, but it was mostly upper management using them, nobody else had time or could get court time. For the rest of us, it was viewed as a waste of space and money. We did have a workout room with some pretty nice equipment also, it was used a lot more than the court.

I went to the Solaris training at the Milipitas campus, nice place, great weather.

Yes, good memories, good company(both Sun and Jabil), great job(fun, interesting, challenging, good pay and benefits). I miss it terribly, wish the economy and job market hadn't tanked, I had planned to work there until retirement. Different world now, not sure if there will a retirement for me(have started life over a couple of times now due to divorce and layoff).

Ditto 'planned' to retire, and ditto divorce/laid-off/etc monkey wrench.

Tsunami/Machio/Slavio chip set was the makings of what is today known as BGA
and a bunch of other innovations.

I got wind of the mess going on between Sun and Jabil and again told to stay out
of it by the East Coast division and SPARC division. Saw it sour more and then
off to Selectron. I actually made a presentation to exec staff recommending
acquiring Jabil around this time, but as usual, they said not in the biz...all along
Milpitas 3 was a PCB plant (won't go into the stupidity of corporate management)
with a state of the art PCB lines (yes, there were three, one being a proto line).

Milpitas campus used to be a country club. Milpitas used to be the dumping ground
for all the the SF Bayarea. Cheap land, onion/garlic fields and junk yards. No more.

The cafeteria across the street from SunU buildings used to be that country club's
main club house.

You missed the hazmat suits across the canal and the huge mounds of dirt excavated
for some condo's. Always wondered it they cleaned whatever it was up 'good enough'

Back on topic...

If such a small run and not complex, consider traditional components and stay away
from SMT's. Easier to work with. Stuck with the chips, but the rest good old lead type.

Heck, would a traditional bread board work?

Assume you guys know what wire wrapping is and just did a search to see if
it's still viable for my own reference for future discussions.

It's still being used

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_wrap
2010 Sep 22nd

http://www.wisegeek.com/in-electronics-what-is-a-wire-wrap.htm
2010 Sep 10th


http://www.wonderhowto.com/how-to-use-wire-wrap-tool-instead-soldering-358064/
2010/6/11....wow!!!!! take a look at the Australian surfer gal !!!!! in the upper left corner
and if it's gone by the time you guys look...here is the link...
http://www.wonderhowto.com/wonderment/who-says-girls-cant-thrash-claire-bevilacqua-has-surfer-dudes-drooling-0119857/
Well....the tiny image got my attention...