Hello, a question for those of you with manufacturing experience:
At what point do the added cost and efforts for automated assembly make
sense?
Assuming the board is mostly SMT, properly designed and not terribly
complicated or large.
I realize this is a very vague question. I am just trying to get an idea of
what kind of quantities people consider worthy of automated assembly.
Thanx,
Tony
Tony Rolando schrieb:
Your last line really provided some insight for me...
Where I work we contract out most assembly. We do somewhat large volume on
most products. We have planned some smaller products that will probably NOT
sell high volumes. I am wondering (aloud I suppose) what route we will take
for assembly of those boards.. I do not make these descisions, just
speculate I suppose.
Well, the answer is ... it still depends.
We do custom (industrial) electronics development with subsequent series
production, sometimes we also do contract manufacturing. Production lots
vary from 10 to >500, but not thousands. I assume this is what is
generally called "not high volumes".
For really low volumes (say, lots of 10 or 20 boards), we often use pure
THT and manual assembly, since this is much more efficient then.
However, as soon as you need some parts in SMT (for example, if you
don't get them in THT packages, or if it must be small), it generally
makes sense to do as much as possible in SMT then - combined with
machine assembly. However, we also have two products with one single SMT
chip on them (not available THT) and the rest in THT. This single chip
is then assembled manually. Or, talking about single quantities
(prototypes), we will assemble a single prototype board with (amongst
other parts) >400 0805 resistors, several tens of ICs (many in
fine-pitch)- of course we will use the machine for that, even if it's
only one board. Time for setting up the machine is much less than the
time we'd need to assemble this amount manually.
You can't give a general statement without caring about (all) details.
Chosing the optimum technology depends on very many details...
Tilmann
Tony Rolando schrieb:
Your last line really provided some insight for me...
Where I work we contract out most assembly. We do somewhat large volume on
most products. We have planned some smaller products that will probably NOT
sell high volumes. I am wondering (aloud I suppose) what route we will take
for assembly of those boards.. I do not make these descisions, just
speculate I suppose.
Well, the answer is ... it still depends.
We do custom (industrial) electronics development with subsequent series
production, sometimes we also do contract manufacturing. Production lots
vary from 10 to >500, but not thousands. I assume this is what is
generally called "not high volumes".
For really low volumes (say, lots of 10 or 20 boards), we often use pure
THT and manual assembly, since this is much more efficient then.
However, as soon as you need some parts in SMT (for example, if you
don't get them in THT packages, or if it must be small), it generally
makes sense to do as much as possible in SMT then - combined with
machine assembly. However, we also have two products with one single SMT
chip on them (not available THT) and the rest in THT. This single chip
is then assembled manually. Or, talking about single quantities
(prototypes), we will assemble a single prototype board with (amongst
other parts) >400 0805 resistors, several tens of ICs (many in
fine-pitch)- of course we will use the machine for that, even if it's
only one board. Time for setting up the machine is much less than the
time we'd need to assemble this amount manually.
You can't give a general statement without caring about (all) details.
Chosing the optimum technology depends on very many details...
Tilmann
