Hello,
We are about receive an 85.000 USD award grant towards purchasing manufacturing or testing equipment for our company. We are trying to figure out how to best use this grant.
Here are short facts about us: We are a design house, so all our manufacturing is currently outsourced. To give you an idea of our output: for 2016, we will have about 15 different designs produced. 10 of these will be new designs, and will be produced in qtys of 30 to 50. 5 of the designs are validated already and will be produced in quantities of 400-1500 each. A total of 7000 boards will be delivered to customers in 2016. Most boards are "complex": A quick survey shows our most common boards have about 50-140 unique and a total of 250-600 components. Most of the passives are 0402 size. Most boards have at least 5-6 BGA devices (0.5 to 1mm pitch FPGA, DDR, Processors etc) and a few QFNs.
Our current pain points:
- We wait for what we think an unreasonable time to get an open "slot" in our assembly partners' factories. If we could get at least the prototypes built in-house, it would be great.
- Testing!: We currently only do functional testing. For a long while, we thought our volumes are not enough to invest in any other testing systems.
- Rework: Especially for initial prototypes, sometimes there is a lot of rework that needs to be done during bring-up. For complex rework, we send the board out to the assembly house, so we lose a lot of time.
Our thoughts on how the money can be invested:
- Basic pick and place setup : Perhaps a manual or semi automatic stencil printer, a "basic" PnP machine (Dima ATOZ pp-050 or Essemtec Lynx/Fox) with enough feeders, and a basic reflow oven.
- Invest in even more basic production setup: A dispenser, a table-top reflow oven, etc.
- Invest in quality rework equipment.
- Keep all production outside of our company, instead, invest in testing systems: ICT, JTAG, etc.
I'd love to hear about what you think how to money should be spent.
Thank you,
Please note:
- No used equipment purchases are allowed for this grant.
- 85K figure is just the grant amount, we can obviously invest more if we can justify the ROI.
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