Printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturing is not a single step operation. Rather, it is complex and involves fabricating the PCB, procuring the components for the PCB, and assembling the components on the PCB, which includes soldering, inspecting, and testing the PCBs. A customer could very well perform each of these operations individually or contract with different service providers to perform each of these operations. Both of these approaches would be time consuming and costly, especially if rework was needed on the circuit design itself. Turn-key PCB assembly not only performs all these tasks with a single service provider, it can do them for less cost, less time, and more convenience. This article discusses turn-key PCB assembly, including a detailed description, advantages, and benefits.
What is Turn-key PCB Assembly?
Turn-key PCB assembly is a service, offered by contract PCB manufacturers, that not only covers all the operations required to produce a circuit card, but also includes services that can decrease costs, such as design for manufacturing (DFM) and design for testing (DFT) services, and improve the quality via a variety of testing services. Parts procurement is a powerful add-on service in turn-key PCB assembly, especially when parts specified in the customer’s design have been obsoleted and need a compatible replacement. Service providers who offer parts procurement have deep relationships with components suppliers and can pass on cost discounts that most customers would not be able to obtain. Turn-key PCB assembly can be utilized by customers seeking full production runs (over 1,000 units) or prototyping PCB runs (under 250 units). By purchasing a turn-key PCB assembly service the customer has the opportunity to focus on their domain expertise, PCB circuit design, while the contract manufacturer manages all other operations needed to produce a PCB.
Customer Benefits of Turn-key PCB Assembly
Determining whether a customer purchases a turn-key PCB assembly or not depends on the customer’s resources, in-house capabilities, deadlines, and more. To fully understand the business benefits of turn-key PCB assembly, let us discuss the benefits in this section.
Decreases Your Costs: One-stop circuit board assembly, spanning PCB fabrication, parts procurement, assembly, testing and shipping, will decrease your costs compared to performing each of these operations individually or using more than one service provider as sub-contractors. This cannot be stressed enough. If one service provider was located in Europe and another is in China and another in the United States, the customer would incur more costs and added time than had they used a turn-key service to do all of the operations.
Improves PCB Quality: Overall quality is improved because the turn-key PCB assembly provider has a higher level of expertise across different disciplines and can more easily oversee the total project. Moreover, turn-key service providers often have quality management systems in place, such as ISO 9001:2015, which certify the quality of their operations.
Fast Turnaround Times: Turn-key service providers have faster turnaround times than other service providers because they can complete all the operations in a coordinated fashion. For something as complex as circuit board manufacturing delays can occur if a customer were to utilize different providers distributed around the world. Moreover, communication failures that can cause delays are often eliminated because a customer only has to work with a single provider.
Problem Identification Before Assembly: If there were a problem with the PCB circuit design and it was not detected prior to the commencement of PCB assembly, correcting the flaw would indeed be more expensive due to not only the added time, but also the need to possible order another lot of parts. This is one of the key benefits of turn-key service providers. They can offer free of charge a design for manufacturing (DFM) service. DFM verifies the circuit design prior to manufacturing. It also ensures that the PCBs can be manufactured efficiently, based on design guidelines that define various tolerances, rules, and testing procedures.
Improves Monitoring Outcomes: Since complete PCB assembly manages all the different operations of PCB assembly, it is usually easy to monitor the outcomes and the final PCB product performance. Turn-key assembly permits PCB engineers and technicians to be aware of the status of the entire PCB assembly operation.
Conclusion
Turn-key circuit board assembly comprises all the tasks and operations of manufacturing a PCB into a single comprehensive service. This offers key benefits to the customers, including cost reductions, quality improvements, faster turnaround times, easier monitoring, and quicker problem identification. Turn-key circuit board assembly can be used by engineers seeking a low number of prototype boards or a company that needs to manufacture a high number of PCBs for a full production run. Turn-key services provide customers a low-cost and convenient way to get their circuit designs tested, assembled, and manufactured.
Feel free to ask any questions that you may have.