I’m getting ready to prepare a board for a volume production order and I need help in designing it for lowering cost of assembly.
To give you an idea of costs, the current board is fairly small 1.5x1.5 inches, all SMT, 0402 components, 1 QFN part, its also double sided. I currently have it on a 10up panel.
The quote I was given for a 1K order (per single board/not panel) was around $6.
This is a very high number compared to the total cost of my board/application.
I will be prepping another revision of this board for final production and have the ability to incorporate in changes for cost reduction. making it single sided, increasing number of boards per panel etc.
I was hoping folks who have gone through such cost reduction cycles could give me an idea on what to do to reduce the cost. I have spoken to several assembly folks and all of them seem very interested in selling services than genuinely helping in guiding me through this process (which is understandable i guess)
After looking at Goldpheonix’s pricing, it looks like number of pads is the main determinant of price, not size or number of layers (I’m not sure what service you’re looking at). That means that decreasing price would require decreasing components, which can be pretty much impossible beyond a point…
IMO, the price of assembly is very high… my 1" X 2" board has about 70+ smt pads on it, so if I used the low volume service from goldpheonix, that would get me a mere 14 boards (1000/70 =14.3) for 150 (not including the stencil), or >10$ per board, which seems very expensive…
Double-sided with small components could be what’s hurting you. If at all possible try to make the board single-sided and it will probably drop significantly in assembly cost. Essentially they have to do everything twice for a double-sided assembly.
Switching to 0603s and larger-pitch parts might also get you a better price. Some mfgs dislike parts smaller than that and charge accordingly - I can’t say whether this is an issue for GoldenPhoenix.
In my experience, when someone quotes you an unreasonable price they’re trying to say “we don’t want this job.” Try to get it quoted at a local assembly house and use that as a baseline. Anything in China should be much lower.
