CIE Components in Electronics
Offshore Electronics, the outsourced contract electronics manufacturing company, has launched a new prototyping service, designed to help OEMs and manufacturers of electronic products drive down production costs, improve quality and reduce time to market.
In particular, the New Product Introduction (NPI) service will make it easier for electronic design engineers to enhance the packaging, performance and reliability of PCBs, electronics and electromechanical assemblies, by considering the requirements and limitations of production systems at the earliest possible stage of development.
Dan Attewell, Sales Engineering Manager at Offshore Electronics, explains that, “We are often presented with layouts for printed circuit boards that are over-engineered, expensive and complex to produce, simply because the designer has not fully considered the implications of the design on the production process. A typical oversight, for example, is to place most components on one side of a board, with just a few on the reverse. This makes it more costly to manufacture than a board with all components on a single side. Although this can sometimes be rectified with a minor redesign, it adds cost and time delays to the process.”
“Our NPI service has therefore been introduced to help Designers engineer production complexity and cost out of each project. This frequently has the added benefit of improving the performance, functionality and reliability of each board.”
In a typical project, Offshore Electronics’ NPI team will work with customers at an early stage of design, providing both the expertise to help them optimise board designs from a production perspective, and the prototyping services to enable each iteration to be proven and perfected, prior to volume manufacturing.
“Our goal”, explains Attewell, “by becoming involved early in the design phase is to help our customers engineer cost out and quality in, and then to provide them with a range of contract electronics manufacturing services, for low and high volume production, which allow them to bring their products to market as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible.”
