Epec's Blog | Electronics Manufacturing Solutions

If you are shipping products from China, underestimating the importance of understanding supplier logistics can come at great peril. Anyone that's been to mainland China has seen some things that probably made you double take in disbelief. You get off the plane, sitting in the back seat of your supplier’s van, most likely jet lagged, and you look out the window to see a bicycle comically overloaded with packages. Once you realize what you're looking at, the first thing you’re probably thinking is I’m really glad my stuff doesn’t get shipped that way. But can you really be sure?

Before designing your custom human-machine interface (HMI) project, it's important to have an idea of all the steps involved before and during production. Each step has variable length so while there isn't an exact timeframe for production, having a more informed viewpoint is critical to everyone's ability for following HMI design best practices.

Flex circuit suppliers come in a variety of different sizes and stages of financial integrity. Choosing the one that will perform the best for your requirements is an important element to the success of you application. Knowing what questions to ask your flex circuit supplier is essential in choosing who will be manufacturing your flex circuits.

For every flexible circuit board manufacturer, there are some key areas you should be aware of. While flex circuits have some similar characteristics to rigid printed circuit boards, they require very different approaches in the manufacturing process.

All companies judge themselves on simple things like revenue, expenses, and income. Most manufacturing companies measure even more metrics like capacity utilization, yield, inventory turns, and on-time delivery. All of which are very important to ensure that business is profitable.

In the world of flexible circuit boards, stiffeners are a common requirement in a lot of flex designs. By definition, a circuit board stiffener provides a mechanical support function and is not part of the electrical schematic of a design.

Today, there are well over 3,000 companies that manufacturer printed circuit boards (PCB) in Asia (China, Taiwan, Japan, India, Korea, Thailand) with the supply capacity continuing to grow well ahead of the global demand.

It is critical for any flex circuit design to be free of errors and violations in order to get the application to market as fast as possible without unnecessary delay. To help designers avoid common IPC PCB design standards violations in rigid-flex PCBs, this blog post will discuss three of the most common IPC Association Connecting Electronics Industries design violations.

A common question in PCB development is why flex and rigid-flex PCB tooling costs more than rigid-only circuit boards. The primary reason is process complexity. Flex circuit tooling involves more fabrication steps, tighter coordination between materials, and a higher level of hands-on engineering compared to standard rigid PCBs.

In addition to fabrication complexity, flex and rigid-flex PCB designs require more engineering programs to be manually created. Many of these steps cannot be fully automated, which increases setup time and engineering labor during the tooling phase.

We find that return merchandise authorizations (RMAs) are a powerful statement of a customer’s level of dissatisfaction. RMAs can offer evidence if a manufacturing process fell short of its goal, there was a lack of communication throughout processes, or even misdiagnosed a problem. In any case, we stand behind our product and are ready to support our customer.