4 ms·
I ran a hardware startup for about a decade. We ended up doing all PCB assembly in China. We did try to find this in the USA, but it was indeed too slow and exp
by seizethecheese 2mo ago
I ran a hardware startup for about a decade. We ended up doing all PCB assembly in China. We did try to find this in the USA, but it was indeed too slow and expensive.
The bottleneck in assembling a PCB is usually component sourcing. My product was not the most complicated, and even then, to assemble in Shenzhen, China, it often took a few weeks to get all the components.
The core issue here is that latency is determined by the outliers. Assembly can't start until you have all units, and the hardest to source one is the bottleneck!
To me, the core innovation here is to plug into the design software to source these long tail items ahead of time.
It's pretty interesting that usually when the PCB is being designed, the designer has no awareness of supply chain. They'll bake in a chip that has a 4 week lead time without even realizing it, when a similar component might be one cent more expensive with much faster lead time.
- willcarkner 2mo agoThis is our first step to work more closely with the designer throughout the process. Currently there's a wall between the designer and the manufacturer, which hurts lead times massively, we're aiming to bring that down.
- awesomeusername 2mo agoI'd love a kicad plugin where not just lead times but current stock etc are showed live, and for anything marginal a button I can smash to order it in advance. Even if 50% of the time I didn't end up using that component, that would still be an amazing service. We pre-order parts to JLC during the design process. I know people using JLC aren't your target but my advise would be to not ignore how gloriously friction-less it is now buying parts into private inventory - and with no ongoing fees as well. They have really nailed it.
- willcarkner 2mo agoThat's exactly what we are trying to do.
- pbronez 2mo agoSome financial engineering could help here too. That abandoned inventory is useful to somebody, but warehousing can be non trivial… how do you get liquid and reroute the parts? There’s some flavor of consignment waiting to happen here.
- hahahaa 2mo agoIs there an opportunity for the design software to suggest alternatives to avoid those long wait time for certain components. E.g. you could also use that kind of capacitor and it is available in 24h.
- willcarkner 2mo agoYes we're going to build that into it. In the pipeline definitely.
- chicken-stew 2mo agothe designer has no awareness of supply chain. Well, you’re asking for a design that boils down to a single channel downconverting I/Q ADC for 21.4 MHz IF, how many such products do you think there are? The ones by TI have been discontinued, your FPGA has no budget to do it and you don’t want one with more oumph so ADI it is … and Mouser says they have 800 on order, so that’s our only option.
- inigyou 2mo agoBut a chip for a 21.6 MHz IF may have 300000 in stock right now, you see the problem?
- vrinsd 2mo agoNot to negate your core points but almost all the HW engineers I've worked with who are experienced absolutely consider sourcing and availability in the decision making process. It was a reason years ago Maxim's ICs were almost always on a "never design in" list since obtaining them was near impossible in reasonable time frames. Most "seasoned" HW engineers who are working lower volumes verify availability with distributors and for high-volume (i.e. 100K units+/yr) work with sourcing people internal to company to get commitments for key ICs.