Epec's Blog | Electronics Manufacturing Solutions

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 vary widely in experience, capabilities, and financial stability. Choosing the right partner is critical to the success of your application.

A structured vetting process helps ensure that your supplier can support design requirements, manufacturing constraints, and long-term production goals. The following five questions identify the most important areas to evaluate when selecting a flex circuit supplier.

Flexible circuits share some characteristics with rigid printed circuit boards, but the manufacturing approach is fundamentally different. The thinness and lack of reinforcement in flex materials introduce unique challenges that affect handling, processing, and dimensional control.

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.

When dealing with requests for custom manufactured custom assemblies, the question that frequently comes up is, "why should a jacketed cable be used in an assembly?" The answer to that question can be determined by looking at three key areas: environment, safety, and cosmetics.