Maker Pro
Maker Pro

Cheap PCB fab place (for non-urgent stuff)

N

Nico Coesel

Jan 1, 1970
0
Joerg said:
Thanks, sounds like a good deal. Unfortunately they seem to do RoHS
boards which I avoid whenever possible. Most of my projects are non-EU
or exempt.

Just have the boards gold plated. The ROHS HAL finishing is okay these
days. There are also silver plated boards but these are slightly
harder to solder. I spray those with flux the minute they arrive.
 
J

John Devereux

Jan 1, 1970
0
Joerg said:
[...]
AFAIK, it is RoHS that is the non-standard option, just like you
want. If you go into their quoting system you will see that you have to
change the defaults for both PCB material and PCB finishing if you do
want RoHS.

Thanks, I looked at the text on the main page which states RoHS. But
it is good to know that one can bow out sans penalty.

Myro are the Canadian office of a Chinese manufacturer AIUI. I have been
dealing with them (from the UK) for over 7 years with generally very
good experience. Some of the pooling services might give better pricing
on prototypes but have their own restrictions. With Myro you can have
non-standard board thicknesses, routing shapes, panelization, scoring,
solder resist colours etc. I have even had them make multiple designs on
the same panel, they don't seem to mind as long as they are pre-combined
in the gerbers, in fact there is an option for that on the quote form.

That is nice, others do not like it or slap on a penalty if you
combine designs. Some of my design just look like two because there is
a 10mm isolation barrier with absolutely nothing on it.

Hopefully Canada doesn't mean it has to go through customs twice,
China -> Canada -> USA.

For the UK they come straight from China, don't know about USA.

One caveat, for production quantities of 2 layer boards I recommend you
specify e-test. You will probably get lucky and be fine, but I once had
a batch with 5% fails. The "flying probe" test has low setup but adds a
fixed ~$0.60 per board. This actually makes a big difference to
production costs because the unit price is otherwise so cheap! OTOH the
"bed of nails" test has high setup but no added cost per board. e-test
is included anyway with 4+ layer AIUI.
 
J

Joerg

Jan 1, 1970
0
Nico said:
Just have the boards gold plated. The ROHS HAL finishing is okay these
days. There are also silver plated boards but these are slightly
harder to solder. I spray those with flux the minute they arrive.

That's what I did once. It cost extra but the boards sure looked posh,
like jewelry. The client was mighty impressed :)

Do they still do nickel-plating these days? Soon I'll have to design one
that needs an RF tight contact to an aluminum enclosure. In the good old
days one could have aluminum nickel-plated but lately all sorts of
environmetal laws threw all that a curve.
 
S

Spehro Pefhany

Jan 1, 1970
0
Thanks, sounds like a good deal. Unfortunately they seem to do RoHS
boards which I avoid whenever possible. Most of my projects are non-EU
or exempt.

I like the electrolytic gold boards, which are available at no premium
AFAIR, but not RoHS solder. The gold-plated boards will work in either
case, and seem to last very well on the shelf, even if you don't take
special precautions against like avoiding cardboard (sulphur).
 
J

Joerg

Jan 1, 1970
0
Spehro said:
I like the electrolytic gold boards, which are available at no premium
AFAIR, but not RoHS solder.


How's the pad adhesion on those, when some g-forces tug on a large SMT part?

... The gold-plated boards will work in either
case, and seem to last very well on the shelf, even if you don't take
special precautions against like avoiding cardboard (sulphur).

Oh, shelf life can reliably be reduced on those as well. Just pick up
chain smoking, but the real stuff such as Bull Durham :)
 
M

Martin Riddle

Jan 1, 1970
0
John Devereux said:
Joerg said:
John said:
John Devereux wrote:
Joerg <[email protected]> writes:
[...]
Thanks, sounds like a good deal. Unfortunately they seem to do
RoHS
boards which I avoid whenever possible. Most of my projects are
non-EU
or exempt.
Well.... don't order them RoHS then! What, you're going to boycott
them
because they *can* do RoHS? :)

No, will have to ask. But what I found with several shops is that
their standard procedure is RoHS and if you deviate from that
there'll
be steep extra charges. Then I'd prefer a place that has a standard
non-RoHS process. However, often I was able to negotiate the $500
or
whatever non-RoHS surcharge away.

AFAIK, it is RoHS that is the non-standard option, just like you
want. If you go into their quoting system you will see that you have
to
change the defaults for both PCB material and PCB finishing if you
do
want RoHS.

Thanks, I looked at the text on the main page which states RoHS. But
it is good to know that one can bow out sans penalty.

Myro are the Canadian office of a Chinese manufacturer AIUI. I have
been
dealing with them (from the UK) for over 7 years with generally very
good experience. Some of the pooling services might give better
pricing
on prototypes but have their own restrictions. With Myro you can
have
non-standard board thicknesses, routing shapes, panelization,
scoring,
solder resist colours etc. I have even had them make multiple
designs on
the same panel, they don't seem to mind as long as they are
pre-combined
in the gerbers, in fact there is an option for that on the quote
form.

That is nice, others do not like it or slap on a penalty if you
combine designs. Some of my design just look like two because there
is
a 10mm isolation barrier with absolutely nothing on it.

Hopefully Canada doesn't mean it has to go through customs twice,
China -> Canada -> USA.

For the UK they come straight from China, don't know about USA.

They do ship direct from China to the USA.

Cheers
 
M

Martin Riddle

Jan 1, 1970
0
Joerg said:
Possibly. But that would be sad.


BGA is another story. I avoid them when at all possible because they
are causing so much grief. Having a stiff ceramic-like chip with
solder pads on a structure such as FR-4 that is by nature somewhat
flexible has IMHO always been a rather sick concept.

<told_ya_so_mode>
The consequences were as predictable as the real estate bubble bust,
pretty soon expensive stuff failed and BGA fix-it shops sprung up in
lots of places. Some folks called me a Luddite for shunning BGAs, many
of them stopped saying that after some time :)
</told_ya_so_mode>

For the same reason I prefer MSOP over DFN. Strangely, the DFN
packages are usually more available.

--

They guys that make stuff that go into things that fly, avoid BGA's like
the plague.

Cheers
 
M

Martin Riddle

Jan 1, 1970
0
Joerg said:
That's what I did once. It cost extra but the boards sure looked posh,
like jewelry. The client was mighty impressed :)

Do they still do nickel-plating these days? Soon I'll have to design
one that needs an RF tight contact to an aluminum enclosure. In the
good old days one could have aluminum nickel-plated but lately all
sorts of environmetal laws threw all that a curve.

--

They must do nickel plating plating prior to gold plating, otherwise the
copper will migrate in to the gold and corrode it.
I know of no other metal that would be substituted.

Cheers
 
S

Spehro Pefhany

Jan 1, 1970
0
How's the pad adhesion on those, when some g-forces tug on a large SMT part?

Have seen no problems with the electrolytic gold. Thicker gold, OTOH,
I've seen issues, but that costs $$$.
Oh, shelf life can reliably be reduced on those as well. Just pick up
chain smoking, but the real stuff such as Bull Durham :)

Yuk. I could dribble slightly used chewin' tobaccer on them too.


Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany
 
When I went on interviews after I graduated a lot of the places did
their own in house prototyping and small production runs several had
there own Pick & Place machines etc. These were I'd say medium to
large companies. With anywhere from 10 to over a hundred employees.

We do our own pick&place but would never consider doing our own PCBs. Too
much EPA nonsense. We do have a prototype machine, but it been sitting in its
shipping crate for four or five years.
For a one man operation yea you wouldn't have time for prototyping or
it wouldn't be cost effective. If you have a staff with say a couple
of Tech's it could be part of their jobs.

You can't really factor in design time and artwork your doing that
anyway or you're not engineering anything.

For me to transfer the artwork to PCB and etch the boards mentioned
it would take 2 to 3 hours. This DOESN'T include drilling holes other
then four for alignment (top/bot) and populating the boards.

Two or three hours is *far* more than the cost of these proto-houses. Figure
at least $100/hr for everyone involved.
If you have a proper etchant tank its not like you have to waste time
watching the boards etch (unless you're into that stuff). Put them in
the tank set the timer and go about other stuff.So a total time of 1
hour to an hour and a half of your time would be spent fabricating the
boards not unreasonable. You would probably waste as much time getting
quotes.

Who maintains the tanks? Does the EPA paperwork? Pays the fines for spills?
No thanks.
 
J

Joerg

Jan 1, 1970
0
Martin said:
They must do nickel plating plating prior to gold plating, otherwise the
copper will migrate in to the gold and corrode it.
I know of no other metal that would be substituted.

I meant nickel sans the gold step. But I assume they would. The other
side would be the aluminum. In the late 80's that was not a problem but
with all the new rules and regs, who knows?
 
J

Joerg

Jan 1, 1970
0
Martin said:
They guys that make stuff that go into things that fly, avoid BGA's like
the plague.

I design stuff that goes into things that fly :)

But that's not the only reason why I avoid them.
 
N

Nico Coesel

Jan 1, 1970
0
Joerg said:
Possibly. But that would be sad.


BGA is another story. I avoid them when at all possible because they are
causing so much grief. Having a stiff ceramic-like chip with solder pads
on a structure such as FR-4 that is by nature somewhat flexible has
IMHO always been a rather sick concept.

AFAIK BGAs are based on an FR4-ish laminate so it can bend along with
the PCB. In my experience some assembly houses do not master their
soldering process and some PCBs are difficult to solder because the
heat absorbtion is not evenly distributed (hot spots/cold spots). If a
BGA package is causing problems its usually not the package itself but
the PCB or the assembly house.
 
N

Nico Coesel

Jan 1, 1970
0
Joerg said:
Gents,

Was mentioned in this month's IEEE Spectrum:

http://batchpcb.com/index.php/Faq

It's not something for urgent projects, you can't have more than four
layers and no really small drill sizes but it sure is cheap. Seems like
this is run by Sparkfun.

There is also makepcb.com. Never tried them though.
 
J

Joerg

Jan 1, 1970
0
[...]
... (Especially
AFAIK BGAs are based on an FR4-ish laminate so it can bend along with
the PCB. In my experience some assembly houses do not master their
soldering process and some PCBs are difficult to solder because the
heat absorbtion is not evenly distributed (hot spots/cold spots). If a
BGA package is causing problems its usually not the package itself but
the PCB or the assembly house.

The failures I've heard about were in mass products which are definitely
professionally soldered. The BGAs I've seen were some sort of ceramic.
After all, a die cannot bend. Even if it was FR-4, think about it, what
will happen if two circuit boards soldered together via bumps are bent?

Same goes for larger DFN packages but often one doesn't have a choice. I
will always prefer MSOP or anything with pins because there is some
movement compliance in the pins.
 
[...]
... (Especially
AFAIK BGAs are based on an FR4-ish laminate so it can bend along with
the PCB. In my experience some assembly houses do not master their
soldering process and some PCBs are difficult to solder because the
heat absorbtion is not evenly distributed (hot spots/cold spots). If a
BGA package is causing problems its usually not the package itself but
the PCB or the assembly house.

The failures I've heard about were in mass products which are definitely
professionally soldered. The BGAs I've seen were some sort of ceramic.
After all, a die cannot bend. Even if it was FR-4, think about it, what
will happen if two circuit boards soldered together via bumps are bent?

Same goes for larger DFN packages but often one doesn't have a choice. I
will always prefer MSOP or anything with pins because there is some
movement compliance in the pins.

We don't like Q/DFNs because they're harder reflow reliably, particularly with
RoHS solder. BGAs above .8mm, OTOH, are simple so we use them whenever
possible. There is rarely a choice between packages this diverse though.
 
J

Joerg

Jan 1, 1970
0
Nico said:
Joel Koltner wrote:
[...]
... (Especially
for commercial products -- for the military/NASA/etc. where price is no
object, I expect niche "leaded" assemblers will stick around... just as
there's already a niche market in de-balling lead-free BGAs and
re-balling them with leaded solder, often at a cost close to or
exceeding the original price of the part!)

BGA is another story. I avoid them when at all possible because they are
causing so much grief. Having a stiff ceramic-like chip with solder pads
on a structure such as FR-4 that is by nature somewhat flexible has
IMHO always been a rather sick concept.
AFAIK BGAs are based on an FR4-ish laminate so it can bend along with
the PCB. In my experience some assembly houses do not master their
soldering process and some PCBs are difficult to solder because the
heat absorbtion is not evenly distributed (hot spots/cold spots). If a
BGA package is causing problems its usually not the package itself but
the PCB or the assembly house.
The failures I've heard about were in mass products which are definitely
professionally soldered. The BGAs I've seen were some sort of ceramic.
After all, a die cannot bend. Even if it was FR-4, think about it, what
will happen if two circuit boards soldered together via bumps are bent?

Same goes for larger DFN packages but often one doesn't have a choice. I
will always prefer MSOP or anything with pins because there is some
movement compliance in the pins.

We don't like Q/DFNs because they're harder reflow reliably, particularly with
RoHS solder. BGAs above .8mm, OTOH, are simple so we use them whenever
possible. There is rarely a choice between packages this diverse though.

Unfortunately the SSOP versions of some of my favorite chips are out of
stock very often while there's always some DFN on the shelf. No idea why
people seem to prefer them, maybe because they use a smidgen less real
estate. It's like with chocolate, my wife craves noisette cream
chocolates but they only have all the others on the shelf. Life's like a
box of ... wait, didn't Forrest Gump's mom say that?
 
Nico Coesel wrote:

Joel Koltner wrote:
[...]
... (Especially
for commercial products -- for the military/NASA/etc. where price is no
object, I expect niche "leaded" assemblers will stick around... just as
there's already a niche market in de-balling lead-free BGAs and
re-balling them with leaded solder, often at a cost close to or
exceeding the original price of the part!)

BGA is another story. I avoid them when at all possible because they are
causing so much grief. Having a stiff ceramic-like chip with solder pads
on a structure such as FR-4 that is by nature somewhat flexible has
IMHO always been a rather sick concept.
AFAIK BGAs are based on an FR4-ish laminate so it can bend along with
the PCB. In my experience some assembly houses do not master their
soldering process and some PCBs are difficult to solder because the
heat absorbtion is not evenly distributed (hot spots/cold spots). If a
BGA package is causing problems its usually not the package itself but
the PCB or the assembly house.

The failures I've heard about were in mass products which are definitely
professionally soldered. The BGAs I've seen were some sort of ceramic.
After all, a die cannot bend. Even if it was FR-4, think about it, what
will happen if two circuit boards soldered together via bumps are bent?

Same goes for larger DFN packages but often one doesn't have a choice. I
will always prefer MSOP or anything with pins because there is some
movement compliance in the pins.

We don't like Q/DFNs because they're harder reflow reliably, particularly with
RoHS solder. BGAs above .8mm, OTOH, are simple so we use them whenever
possible. There is rarely a choice between packages this diverse though.

Unfortunately the SSOP versions of some of my favorite chips are out of
stock very often while there's always some DFN on the shelf. No idea why
people seem to prefer them, maybe because they use a smidgen less real
estate.

Maybe people like the SSOPs, so buy them all. ;-)

I guess I never compare availability since we wouldn't think of using a DFN if
a SSOP was an alternative. Unfortunately, D/QFNs are all that's available in
many regulators and codecs.
It's like with chocolate, my wife craves noisette cream
chocolates but they only have all the others on the shelf.

Because they've sold all the good stuff.
Life's like a box of ... wait, didn't Forrest Gump's mom say that?

DFNs? No, I don't remember that part.
 
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