Quote for 100 boards (ENIG) on Bay Area Circuits, 10 days lead time, excluding shipping: $1000 ($1244 for 5 days lead time)
Todays quote for exact same 100 boards (ENIG) on pcbway.com, _including_ DHL shipping cost, 2 days lead time: $148 (shipping to Bay Area is usually 2 days with DHL, so really 4 days lead time). I've never had any quality issues and my boards have fine pitch 0.4mm BGA parts.
Yeah no, not even close. Certainly not marginally higher.
It's slightly cheaper than oshpark.com, they want $15 a board.
Together we prototyped a product over a 2 month period, him handling the HW and EE bits and me writing the board firmware and HIL simulator/test-harness.
We would get some boards, he would find and correct any issues with the board, get a new file to the board house before 5pm and we would get new boards in the morning at 9am delivered by a motorbike courier for about $20 or something. As a software guy that seemed pretty insane to me.
All up we probably did about 6 or 7 HW revisions like that and a few of those probably could have been avoidable if more care was taken but why would we when it's so cheap to iterate so quickly?
Unfortunately for various reasons we didn't choose to continue the project but I learnt a hell of a lot and really enjoyed hanging in Shenzhen and getting to understand the hacker culture there a bit more. We burnt overall a pretty small amount of money to learn some important lessons that I think would have been much more expensive anywhere else in the world.
If you every write more about it, please post a link here in HN, I'm sure tons of people would be interested in more details about the what, why, how of what you were doing, and life in Shenzhen.
China is dramatically cheaper than domestic.
If it wasn't for the DoD requiring all military parts be domestically manufactured, there probably wouldn't be a board house (or metal fab) left in the US.
As far as PCB fab or PCBA quality issues, I’m unable to think of any problems I’ve had across 15+ orders over the last three years. I just got another two PCBA jobs back in the last couple weeks and they were great.
I’m honestly in awe of what JLCPCB does and it’s a big inspiration to me for how much better things could be in the USA if we were committed to manufacturing.
> The Universal Postal Union set up a fee so richer countries would pay more to have their international mail delivered than countries with developing economies.
> "The central idea is that any citizen or business should be able to send mail packages through the Global Postal Network to any destination," said Schoorl.
> At the time, China was considered a country with a developing economy, meaning the country would be charged less for international mail than other countries. And that went unchanged for decades.
> As e-commerce took off in the 2010s, China found itself with a major competitive advantage. It could ship to North America at a cheap rate. Canada Post and the U.S. Postal Service were delivering packages and not being compensated very well, says Schoorl.
* https://www.cbc.ca/radio/costofliving/shipping-canada-china-...
> China is still considered a “transitional” country by the UPU, which means it enjoys a lower rate for sending mail to a developed nation like the US. As a result, mail services from China to the US cost less than Americans are charged by their own postal service for a comparable domestic delivery. This gives Chinese sellers a competitive edge over American sellers, especially in e-commerce platforms like eBay or Amazon, where shipping cost is a major factor for buyers.
* https://medium.com/@contact_53404/why-is-it-so-cheap-to-ship...
It shouldn't be cheaper to ship something from China than from the next town over.
Then to paper over the losses of having to carry that massively underpriced mail from China, local deliveries have to increase in cost.
And I’m not saying “every metro should have competitive world class manufacturing of every type”, which is such a strong claim as to feel strawman-ish (but I get the sense you didn’t mean to do so). I do however deeply wish we had Shenzhen-like manufacturing hubs on the east and west coasts.
There is of course a large labour cost delta and probably a skills shortage in the US that might be an obstacle for making something like this be economically sustainable/competitive - but if it could be automated sufficiently so that labour cost is less of an issue, is this even feasible in theory?
I know there are some fabs being built, but beyond that is some kind of broader electronics manufacturing hub in the US conceivable?
From the article it sounds like the manufacturing is staying in Asia but moving to politically allied countries where new infra is being built for this. Is it still mainly a labour cost issue?
My complaint is that domestic board houses are super expensive, so I meant competitive with Chinese production. The person replying to me above said they are "marginally more expensive" but another commenter here went through the full quoting process and got a price that is about 8x higher than a reputable fab in China, which is not "marginally more expensive".
So why go domestic? For us, there were IP concerns (that we'd already seen with non-electronic products), there were concerns about shipments getting held up in customs, and there were concerns about manufacturing support. If you want boards to be flashed and tested at the factory, so you can dropship your assembled product to whatever its final destination, its very valuable to send somebody to the board house to work with their integration engineers to do it. I ended up spending most of a week commuting to a board house in Fremont in 2021, so I could train up their people on operating the programming and testing jig we'd built, and operating the calibration system we'd built. Driving from my home (at the time) in Oakland to Fremont was much much easier than flying to Shenzen (or wherever), I didn't have to contend with the great firewall, and if something went wrong, I could be over in 45 minutes. All during the California (and also China) Covid lockdowns.
That is what you're getting with a domestic board house, so if none of that is a concern, there's really no reason to pay the borderline extortionate premium to do it.
Given the extreme efficiency of international shipping logistics, I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect any given metro area to have competitive world class manufacturing of every type. The cost of real estate alone makes it hard to compete.