PCBA Oy Vey

October 16, 2014 4:44 PM

There are a ton of printed circuit board assembly companies in Asia. How do I choose one?

I need to have some PCBAs done in qtys of about 1,000 at a time. So it's not prototype quantities and it's not what is generally considered to be high volume. They are fairly basic boards that don't require any particular type of expertise such as cellular or whatever.

Can anyone recommend some PCBA companies in Taiwan or Mainland China that are focused on this kind of mid-volume range, provide competitive pricing, decent lead times, and are very reputable and reliable in terms of responsive and prompt communication, quality control, honesty and integrity (such as not changing parts without authorization), and taking full responsibility if they screw up?

The reason I'm looking for a manufacturer there is because these boards will be used in final assembly of a product there.

Thank you.

posted by Dansaman to Technology (5 answers total)

How many layers?

PTH? SMT?

FR-4/G10? Polyamide?

Min. line/feature widths?

Have you looked into a more vertically integrated house that has a captive PCB fab?
posted by ZenMasterThis at 5:56 PM on October 16, 2014

Worth asking over at the EEVblog forum - I know there's a few people there who have similar-sized runs made, though I don't know offhand if any are using Chinese PCBA services.

If all else fails, there's a few people there working in HK / China who can probably point you in the right direction.
posted by Pinback at 10:30 PM on October 16, 2014

Seems like a good question to ask your assembly house.
posted by doctord at 8:24 AM on October 17, 2014

I was hoping someone would come along with a good answer to this. When I lived in Shanghai, I used various middlemen -- basically just stalls at the local electronics market -- for prototypes, and in quantities of ten or less, generally didn't have any problems. However, I was never satisfied with the quality and customer service of any of the half-dozen production houses I used for short-run (~1000pcs) production work. A few places in the Shanghai/Jiangsu/Zhejiang area had really good customer service, but poor quality and nonexistent qc. The Shenzhen/Dongguan companies produced high quality boards, but their customer service and communication were terrible. One place was was so combative that just placing an order meant arguing on the phone all day. The best one still tried to sneak in unauthorized substitutions in order to save literally fractions of a cent per board. Finally, I ended up having a friend-of-a-friend's factory run my stuff off the books.

Now that I'm back in the US, I've found I don't have the patience for dealing with these kinds of hassles, so I've been using MyroPCB for prototypes. I don't know anything about their operations except that so far my three orders have come back exactly as I specified, within the lead time they quoted, with no arguments or excuses. For production of my latest project, I want to be able to say "Made in the USA", so I plan to use a local Austin-based PCB fab -- probably RapidPCB.
posted by bradf at 2:28 PM on October 17, 2014

A lot of hobbyist/kickstarter level people use Seeedstudio for everything.
posted by miyabo at 8:20 PM on October 17, 2014