Before finalizing a future printed circuit boards supplier, a lot of reviews and screening are necessary from the customer’s side. PCB Trace Technologies Inc recommends never rushing to choose a PCB manufacturing and assembly service without adequate screening by the customer. When screening, it is necessary to ask them key questions. This will not only let customers pick the most dependable manufacturer, but also prevent them from linking up with dubious ones.
For more information, please visit our website.
Two of the most important areas that concern customers when getting their PCBs manufactured are:
The customer must ask the manufacturer questions about their practices, processes, and certifications to make sure of getting the best quality boards after fabrication and assembly. PCB fabricators typically have a broad range of capabilities. In-depth questioning about their quality systems, processes, and compliance with international standards will reveal a wealth of information. Customers must allow their design and engineering teams adequate time to allow them to prepare key questions for the printed circuit board services. These could include:
Looking into the experience level of the PCB supplier. This is an important factor, since there is a greater chance that a fabricator with a vast experience has already handled the type of boards the customer requires. Inexperienced manufacturers are more likely to experiment with the requirements to gain their experience. This could not only play havoc with production timelines, but also saddle the customer with flawed PCBs. It is preferable to prioritize companies with more experience.
Questioning the manufacturer about the number of years they are in business may seem simplistic. However, it is only the beginning to opening the doors to further questions about the type of boards they have produced earlier, and whether their services match the customer’s expectations. For instance, a manufacturer may have above 20 years of experience in producing rigid boards. However, they may not be able to produce flexible boards, as they do not have that experience.
It is important to know if the PCB supplier has their own manufacturing facility. For instance, if they do not have their own facility, they will simply be acting as mediators, and may not be capable of providing the consistent quality of boards the customer needs. Therefore, a reliable manufacturer must not only claim to have a large manufacturing facility, but should be one who owns their manufacturing unit.
Manufacturers with their own manufacturing unit must also have adequate staff to operate the facility. Appropriate staff levels allow them to sustain best practices when they handle large orders.
Another advantage with adequate number of employees is the PCB production unit can commence work on a new order without inordinate delays. For instance, if they are already running other orders, and they have maxed out their capacity, the next order must wait until they have free capacity. The increase the turnaround time may not match the customer’s production cycle.
Even with an adequate level of staffing, there is no guarantee the output quality will be up to the customer’s requirement if the employees lack proper education and training. It is necessary the manufacturer has engineering expertise necessary for reviewing boards and making recommendations for improvement. Proper skill and training is necessary for operators to effectively handle the process machinery.
Questions about staff education and training often discloses the ability of the manufacturer to collaborate across various organizational levels, while communicating effectively.
It is frequently necessary for the customer to know if the manufacturer can ship to their location. Depending on the location, the fabricator may require a license to export products to other countries or to ship to a specific location, without issues. There is no point engaging in quality discussions and price negotiations if the manufacturer does not have the capability of delivering to the requisite destination.
It is important to know if the PCB production unit has a minimum order requirement, and a maximum order limit. The minimum order requirement is significant if the customer is a small organization, or they are looking for a short run of a specific product. Information about the maximum order limit is necessary in case the plan is to scale up the PCB requirements in the future.
Establishing these factors in the beginning is necessary, as PCB requirements are ongoing for a company, and the customer is looking for a dependable manufacturer to meet not only the current requirements, but also their future requirements.
It is necessary for the customer to know the cancellation policy of the PCB supplier, if they should cancel the order. The customer must make sure to have full information on the order cancellation policy before placing the order. This helps to avoid running into unpleasant surprises in case of order cancellation.
Some printed circuit board fabrication units place higher priority on delivering products quickly at low costs. Others value effectiveness and factor stakeholder requirements in their decisions. The difference between being efficient and effective lies in the way manufacturers involve in process control.
The customer must know whether the manufacturer will align their processes to meet the requirements of the board’s shape, layout, materials, and components. This is important as the decision will also impact the sub-processes involved in the manufacturing stages.
The manufacturer’s processes must ultimately lead to matching the customer’s design specifications with the necessary precision and accuracy. They must take time to know whether the manufacturer has the ability to create accurate images, has the equipment to maintain a precise alignment of layers in multilayer boards. Whether they can accurately etch each layer, drill vias and mounting holes with precision, and provide the board with the necessary surface finish.
The customer may need to take decisions about electronic components, thereby impacting PCB assembly stages. For instance, they may have to choose between using through-hole components and surface mount components for their board. The manufacturer must have appropriate equipment to handle the technology. For surface mount components, the manufacturer must have the proper pick-and-place equipment and reflow soldering machines. For handling through-hole components, they should have auto-insertion equipment and wave soldering machines.
If the boards are for medical and aerospace applications, the customer must find out if the manufacturer has specific board cleaning technology.
Proper process control and technology application allows the manufacturer to maintain the necessary turnaround time for delivery, while ensuring a satisfactory product quality.
To maintain a proper process control, the manufacturer must also have adequate inspection and testing procedures in place. This is necessary for error-detection and to take remedial measures on process parameters from start of manufacturing to the finish.
It is important to know what inspection methods the manufacturing process uses and where. Essential stages of inspection must involve stencil and solder paste deposition, component mounting, and soldering. This may involve manual inspection and automated optical inspection. Soldering BGA may require X-ray inspection. The customer must make sure inspection processes have the capability to detect wrong polarity, missing components, wrong components, solder shorts, insufficient solder, and or excessive solder.
It is necessary to find out about the capability of the manufacturer to conduct first article inspection. This involves destructive testing of the first few completed electronic circuit boards to ensure they are made of the specified materials and technology.
Electronic circuit board manufacturers typically exhibit information about their certificates, thereby demonstrating their commitment to quality and compliance with international standards.
The customer must find out if the manufacturer complies with the ISO quality management standard. This is an international standard, and certification to this standard shows the manufacturer can meet or exceed the customer’s needs through a company-wide quality management system.
If necessary for the boards, the customer must find out if the manufacturer’s products comply with IPC, UL, RoHS, WEEE, ISO and/or other specific international standards.
The electronics industry places great importance to environmental sustainability. Most reputable manufacturers comply with RoHS standards, restricting the use of hazardous substances throughout the manufacturing process. The customer should ask about the ability of the manufacturer to treat waste water from the fabrication processes.
ESD or electrostatic discharge is one of the major causes of initial failure of electronics assembly. Static electricity accumulating on operator clothing can discharge through electronic components causing latent failure that may not show up in regular testing, but cause field failures to increase.
The manufacturer must be aware of ESD and the entire manufacturing setup must have proper ESD safeguards in place, including anti-static mats and grounding arrangements. Assembly operators must wear anti-static clothes, including proper head-dress and shoes.
The customer must also find out if the manufacturer extends ESD safeguards to their warehouse or storage facility. Storage of PCBs and components before and after assembly is an important factor affecting the quality of products.
It is essential that the manufacturer uses a climate-controlled storage facility to store bare PCBs. The customer must find out if the manufacturer uses vacuum-packed, heat-sealed, moisture-barrier bags for storing PCBs. This is significant if their boards must not develop camber and twist during storage.
Medical and aerospace products may require PCBs to be thoroughly baked before assembly. If necessary for their boards, customers should find out if the manufacturer has the necessary infrastructure and machinery for baking boards.
You will get efficient and thoughtful service from Qingjian Electronics.
With so many circuit board fabrication units to select from, it may be overwhelming for customers to pick the right one. PCB Trace Technologies Inc recommends that with judicious questioning, the task of separating the best from the others will become easier. Proper questioning will demonstrate firsthand how some manufacturers simply do not measure up to the others.
Asking a PCB manufacturer key questions about practices, processes, and certification ensures the quality of PCBs during fabrication and assembly.
Design and engineering teams should have adequate time to prepare questions for PCB manufacturers.
The broad range of capabilities seen with PCB manufacturers requires in-depth questions about quality, processes, and compliance with international standards.
As a parent, you quickly become used to an ongoing stream of questions from your child. On an almost daily basis, parents handle the most important questions of a lifetime. “Why? Where did I come from? How did I get here?” rank high on my personal list of favorites.
In the business of designing and producing printed circuit boards (PCBs), the ability to ask the right questions can provide value and save money. Within the right environment, asking questions leads to a healthy exchange of ideas and perspectives. Those exchanges foster learning and innovation. The ability to ask questions may also prevent leaders and teams from making decisions that lead to unacceptable risk. In this article, we discuss the critical questions to ask a PCB Manufacturer to establish confidence that you will be getting an excellent product.
Asking the right questions of a PCB manufacturer has roots in best practices and reflects both knowledge and credibility. The right questions allow design and engineering teams to move past surface issues such as availability and discounted costs. When asked the right questions, PCB manufacturers recognize that a team has credibility, knowledge, and insight.
Although asking a PCB manufacturer how many years they have been in business may seem simplistic, the response to that question sets the table for other questions about the type of boards they have produced and whether the products and services match the expectations of your team. For example, if a PCB manufacturer has fifteen years of experience producing rigid boards and has not produced another type of board, the manufacturer—despite 15 years of experience—probably cannot meet your expectations for producing rigid-flex boards, since they don’t have that experience.
Other questions to ask a PCB manufacturer include:
How many employees do you have?
PCB manufacturers that have the appropriate staffing levels have a better ability to sustain best practices when faced with producing larger orders.
What kind of education and training do your employees have?
PCB manufacturers should have the engineering expertise needed for reviewing quick prototype requests and for making recommendations to design teams. Questions of this type often disclose the ability—or lack of ability—of a PCB manufacturer to communicate effectively and to collaborate across different organizational levels.
What is your company’s manufacturing philosophy?
PCB manufacturers that place efficiency as a high priority concentrate on delivering products quickly at lower costs. In contrast, PCB manufacturers that value effectiveness begin with a stakeholder analysis and continue by factoring stakeholder requirements into their decisions.
Answers to the above questions can help your team formulate a budget while also showing if time-to-market predictions include stage-by-stage quality control.
Much of the difference between efficiency and effectiveness involves process control. The processes defined by a PCB manufacturer must align with the decisions that your team makes about the board layout, shape, type, materials, and components, and all of this impacts the sub-processes that make up each stage of the larger manufacturing process.
In addition, those processes must match the design specifications for precision and accuracy. Along with other processes, a manufacturer must have the ability to create correct positive and negative images, maintain the alignment of layers within multilayer boards, etch inner and outer layers, drill precise vias and mounting holes, and apply the optimal finishes.
Your team’s decisions about components might also impact PCB assembly stages. For example, a decision to use surface mount technology components requires the correct type of pick-and-place equipment. Any use of through-hole components also requires the appropriate wave soldering equipment. Some applications—such as aerospace or medical applications—may require a PCB manufacturer to have specific board cleaning procedures.
Solid processes should produce a balance between delivering products ahead-of-or-on schedule and ensuring that the quality of the product satisfies or surpasses stakeholder requirements. Any discussion about efficiency and effectiveness should focus on the ability of the manufacturer’s processes to meet schedules and demonstrate quality control. Questions should touch on the following:
The technologies that a PCB manufacturer uses
Their ability to review board and product designs
The level of error-detection used from the start of manufacturing to the end of manufacturing
Most PCB manufacturers post certification information that demonstrates their commitment to and compliance with international standards. When interviewing manufacturers, ask about their compliance with the International Standards Organization ISO: quality management standard. ISO certification shows that the manufacturer can meet or exceed the needs of its customers through a quality management system that includes company leadership, planning activities, operations, support, and performance management.
Environmental sustainability has become a top priority for the electronics industry. Reputable PCB manufacturers enforce Restrictions of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) standards throughout the manufacturing process. RoHS regulations restrict the use of Lead, Mercury, Cadmium, Hexavalent Chromium, Polybrominated Biphenyls, and Polybrominated Diphenyl Ethers during fabrication. PCB manufacturers must have the ability to provide surface finishes that meet the RoHS requirements. When asking about RoHS compliance, also request information about the manufacturer’s ability to treat wastewater produced during PCB fabrication processes.
Another key certification for PCB manufacturers involves UL listings. Compliance with the UL listing service shows that manufacturers rigorously test products to protect against flammability and delamination risks. Questions about the capability of a manufacturer to test boards should cover the in-house procedures, the type of in-house equipment, and maintenance procedures.
Key parts of testing procedures include First Article Inspection (FAI) or the testing of the first one or two completed boards to ensure the correct use of materials, the appropriate quantity of materials, the correct application of component mounting, stenciling, and soldering technologies, and an inspection of printing, placement, and soldering. Additional manual inspections, automated optical inspections, and automated X-ray inspections allow manufacturers to check component polarity and locate scratches, open conditions, shorted conditions, incorrect components, missing components, insufficient solder, or excessive solder.
Compliance with the ISO standard assures design teams that a manufacturer has the capability to trace any problems encountered with a board to a root cause. The ability to trace—or traceability—shows that a manufacturer can successfully check production processes, supply chain issues, or maintenance problems. Questions about traceability can cover processes such as the assignment of lot codes for materials arriving from the supply chain, the type of equipment used to perform chemical solution checks, and the assignment of lot and date codes to completed PCBs.
PCB manufacturers should also demonstrate compliance with IPC standards. Those standards cover all classes and types of boards and establish performance and quality levels. The IPC standards also describe quality expectations for the supply chain and the capability of manufacturers to source and trace critical components.
Problems with PCB production can occur between fabrication and assembly. Because an important part of quality involves the storage of PCBs after fabrication, IPC has issued the IPC standard to cover handling for boards. Your design team should ask if the PCB manufacturer uses climate-controlled storage and about the temperatures and humidities observed in the storage facilities. Along with requesting information about the storage facilities, your team should also ask if the manufacturer stores PCBs in a heat-sealed, vacuum-packed moisture barrier bag. Improperly stored PCBs can delaminate after reflow, crack, tarnish, and develop bad solder joints.
Now that you know which questions to ask a PCB manufacturer, check out our PCB Design and Analysis Software page for more cutting edge PCB design advice. Our Allegro PCB Editor can help you bring your next great design to life.
For more information, please visit Printed Circuit Board Manufacturer.