How to get an instant PCB online quote?

Printed circuit board technology deposition makes industry highly developed. The PCB quote comes to be transparent. PCB industry profits come to be averaged. During past a couple of months, being impacted by current global economic recession, a variety of PCB manufacturers have been withdrawing from this market, in particular the small business providing low manufacturing capabilities and without scale and outstanding services. Regarding online quote, currently many PCB makers can do this, because PCB is likely to be standard product, although the manufacturing process should be customized.

To get an instant PCB quote, you have to provide some basic info: layer(s), size, laminate, surface finish, test requirements. But in terms of special requirements such as impedance, limited line spacing and width, blind via, buried via etc., engineer has to figure out the quote through more efforts.

During the process of calculating total cost, upstream laminate price is becoming transparent, so PCB makers only have to work out cost of labor, water, electricity, workshop rental, pollution management, wastage, machinery depreciation and then figure out the BEP (Break-Even Point). For online PCB quote, price of common double layer is about $50~90 USD/m2, but $90~100 USD/m2 for PCBs with special manufacturing requirements. Of course, the price discrepancy depends on processing, quality and services of the PCBs.

5 Crucial Aspects of PCBA Quality Control

The incremental need of electronic products propels rapid expansion of electronic manufacturing industry, involving upgrading technology deposition. With popularity of smart phone and wearable devices, there are refined and high requirements of manufacturing capabilities, which contributes quality control concerns of PCBA manufacturers. Here are 5 crucial aspects of PCBA quality control.

1. PCB Fabrication

There are huge many factors to impact PCB quality, the most important are laminate, dusty-free exposure and copper plating. Rather than factory facilities and environment, we should look into these quality controls. Laminate grade starts from A to C with big price difference. We also know the purity management of dusty-free plant through third-party documents. PCB copper plating has high requirements of consistency and uniformity, regular exchange management of solution and equipment maintenance. Also, copper plating process should be enhanced during practice of a variety of projects.

2. Components Sourcing

Original branding components are crucial to surface mounting technology, which can prevent batch defects from the source. Electronic Manufacturing Services (EMS) enterprises should set IQC (Incoming Quality Control) position to ensure all incoming materials in consistency and uniformity. IQC will manage sample-check of components shape, default value and error limit. Also, EMS enterprises should continually optimize components sourcing channels.

3. Surface Mounting Technology

During PCB assembly process, EMS enterprises should confirm the solder paste in consistency and uniformity, set SMT programming properly to ensure high precision of IC and BGA assembly. It is necessary to put all PCBs to 100% AOI (Automatic Optical Inspection) and (IPQC, In-Process Quality Control). Meanwhile, we should fulfill strict management of tray and verify stack list.

4. PCBA Test

Test points are generally reserved by design engineer and relative test plan will be passed to PCBA manufacturer. Circuit voltage and current curve will be analyzed during ICT (In-Circuit Test) and FCT (Function Circuit Test). A collection of these results will be reviewed according to assigned test plan, then confirm the acceptance area, as well as customer future improvements.

5. Managing People

For PCBA manufacturers, well-equipped machines are only small part, the big part is the people management. Manufacturing management team should figure out scientific work flow and monitor the operation guides are handled properly.

In fierce competition of PCBA market, manufacturers should constantly optimize their internal quality management. The refined manufacturing management will adapt market demand and could be the lifeline of PCBA manufacturers.

6 Untapped Sales Thoughts Before Starting Your Business

If you don't know how to sell, starting your own business must be a risk thing. How opportunity comes? It is actually driven by customer demands. As long as we can keenly look into customer demands and then think about how to notify the customers and convey excellent experiences, profits come subsequently.

In terms of sales, many guys think more complexly. In summary, you have to remember only 3 words: pain spot, tickle spot and excitement spot. Let us see simply definitions.

1.    Pain spot

What problems customer has, which makes him sleepless and annoying. These pain spots are what we should solve for customer.



2.    Tickle spot

Uncomfortable factors making customer in a dilemma. Customer needs somebody to scratch the tickle.


3.    Excitement spot

The excitement that makes customer shout “WOW” and stay in pleasure.


How are 6 cases to impress you. Hope you can be inspired through them.
ONE: Accurate Customer

Taxi driver is easily afflicted with hemorrhoids due to sitting for long time. If we can push audio or text advertisement of hemorrhoids drug by using taxi App under the downtown district, this is absolutely accurate marketing. It is said that there are 5 people replying to one message. When you pay no attention to this, others have been doing for long.

[Tips] Beyond surface, we can find taxi drivers’ pains such as hemorrhoids, lumbar disease and then dig customer demands for making a deal.


TWO: Increase Profits

You are shopping apples and asking “how much?”
Seller: “$1 USD for this stack”.
You: “How about apples on the other side?”
Seller: “$1.5 USD”.
You: “Why it’s more expensive?”
Seller: “Looks better”.
You decided to buy apples on price $1.5USD.
Afterwards, seller divided the apples as 2 stacks and sold them on price $1.5USD very soon.

[Tips] This is customer excitement spot. When you have only one price, customer decides to buy or not; When you have two prices, customer decides to buy the good or better. Actually, more customers buy better commodities, which will directly increase your profits.


THREE: Promote Customer Repeat Purchase

A fine menswear shop launched member service of dry cleaning of the clothes for FREE every month. Regular member: 1 time/month; Silver member: 2 times/month; Golden member: 3 times/month. The amazing happened. Customers will take their clothes to the shop for dry cleaning and look around new arrivals while waiting for their clothes. You know, more clothes were sold. Look, free gift or service is so powerful.

[Tips] Launch low cost value-added service, which can activate customer repeat purchasing.


FOUR: Strengthen Your Customer Relationship

Customer does not need your weekly greeting, postcard or SNS sharing. It’s terrible that you think your customer can remember you. These actually seem to be annoying. So please do NOT waste time on this. The right way is to analyze where your customer stands and learn how to pay and gain. For example, you can prepare a small bunch of flowers for lady customer every week. It is not expensive and will show your sincerity. More importantly, your customer likes it. You can prepare high end liquor for gentleman customer. You should also make your customers feel honored while picking up them. Besides material needs, we have to pay attention to their spiritual needs, such as mutual communication of interests and useful suggestions.

[Tips] You have to pay before gaining what you want and focus on customer spiritual needs more.


FIVE: Enhance Brand Awareness Through Place

After initial access to local market, a commodity maker did a weird thing that they placed first retail store in high-cost downtown and near big brand: Chanel. At the very beginning, many people confused about it, but gradually understood the reason. Customers probably think that a brand neighboring Chanel must be high-end brand. The smart manufacturer quickly promote brand awareness with cost of opening a direct store.

[Tips] Your brand place in customers’ heart is determined by whom you stand nearby. You can build brand awareness by marketing big brands.


SIX: Sales Psychology

A lady loved to buy delicate tableware, but her husband denied due to high price. At this moment, the shopping guide stepped forward and said only one sentence. After that, the husband went to cash counter to pay immediately. Do you know the reason of the man’s quick turn? The shopping guide said “Your wife would not ask you to wash the expensive tableware.”

[Tips] Customers don’t buy because they have no pains. So we only have to explore what customers think and their pains.

The last important thing is: just do it now. The author comes from NOD Electronics, a PCBA provider.

How to Select EMS Provider?

With internet high and quick penetration to traditional manufacturing industries, it’s becoming easier to complete international purchasing. However, enough provider options make our purchase decision waste a lot of time and hard to finalize. Purchase managers always complain that the selected provider is out of expectations despite big efforts and costs. So, how to select our EMS (Electronic Manufacturing Service) and PCBA provider?

Before an answer to this question, we have to understand a basic concept of cooperation. Long good cooperation is built on counterpart term, which includes enterprise size, manufacturing capabilities, services level and perspectives. Therefore, the provider selected by purchase manager at first might not be matched with project requirements, because there are big bugs of evaluation metrics of EMS providers. Now please go through some methods below.

Online Brand Awareness

You can catch up with rich information through EMS provider website and its social media pages. It’s hard to imagine that an EMS provider who has no official website or no related results on Facebook, Twitter, Linked In can offer you outstanding exporting services, and so does provider owning bad website (pure template, without any design thoughts and updates). Here are some evaluation terms.

1. Aesthetics design of website

2. Daily or weekly update of website

3. Brand clues or reports on Facebook, Twitter, Linked In

4. Any released video on YouTube.


Manufacturing Capabilities

It is supposed to view PCB manufacturing capabilities and PCB assembly capabilities of EMS provider on website. If the related info did not display on website, we could judge that this provider really ignored customer concerns. The sign of massive duplicate or contradictory content on website is also evidence for evaluating the provider manufacturing capabilities.


Quote Analysis

Never kill a potential good provider because of the initial quote, even 50% higher than your target, because providers quoted on basis of limited conditions and 100% unclear market positioning of your product, manufacturing process details and test plan. It actually exists that provider quoted higher thought about these requirements. But provider quoted low only aimed to earn regardless of product quality at first. Normally the initial quote is based on small batch order or sample order, so it is reasonable to see big price discrepancy.


Quality Control

Professional EMS provider places column of quality control on website, which includes metrics of manufacturing process and internal management. We can evaluate the provider on this base.


Approved Certificates

Provider with certificates such as UL, CE, RoHS, TS16949, ISO9001 is likely to fulfill quality and stability of PCB manufacturing and assembly services.


Professional Sales Man

You can recognize if you are facing a professional sales man during a short call by aspects such as fluent English, sophisticated business knowledge, good communication. This is another metric to evaluate EMS capabilities and experiences of the provider.


B2B platform is gradually coming to phase of scale returns. Enterprises who like to spend money on B2B platform can earn good rank in search results. Rather, Google, Yahoo and Bing are more likely to be trusted, because of sophisticated algorithms. Good rank company tend to have advanced manufacturing capabilities and outstanding services. So please carefully filter the search results of first 3 pages and handle above evaluation metrics. Good Luck.

2015 Situation of China Electronics Manufacturing Industry

China government officially released GDP growth at 7% in the first half of 2015. However, civic researches showed a declining actual economical data. China government proposed solutions to stimulate the entity economy. China, being the super manufacturing country, the electronic manufacturing situation as part of China entity economy has been a big concern. It becomes an important signal of global stagnating economy.

Industry insiders from other countries disclose that recession could be traced clearly in electronics manufacturing industry. A lot of companies are struggling to survive. But what caused the economic downturns trend?

China experienced the last ten year of economy growth pattern of investment-led. Now the “train” is slowing down. As the total GDP is growing, guarding the figure 7% is extremely difficult, even reflecting some political factors. Nowadays, China government is starting to advocate new economical concepts of “The Belt and Road Initiative”, “Internet +”, “Made in China 2025”, etc, aiming at breaking out of the old economical patterns and shaping China new economical pattern, representing by new manufacturing industry, new trading industry and hi-tech manufacturing power.

Every conversion is slow and painful. However, history told the regulations which China government insisted would gain the expected results in the end. It owes to the only one Party in China. As a result, in the same time of facing economical decline and looking for solutions, we need to foresee the influence to the world due to the conversion of China future economical patterns. The economy-led to Europe and Asia by "The Belt and Road Initiative", AIIB couldn't be ignored.

For those enterprises involved in oversea trading, seizing the opportunity of present China capacity output and capturing the positives brought by future economy pattern conversion would be meaningful in terms of strategic decision. The author comes from NOD Electronics, a PCB assembly service provider.

7 elements to build a high-value brand from nothing

Do 70% of logos in wrong design take customers into trouble?

Is cost the first principle of naming a brand and product?

Is packing the most powerful marketing plan?

Successful enterprise has its own unique genetic code, so as a high-value brand has its own dramatic identifications. Brand is not exclusive for big company. Brand study and abstract are the basic focuses for small-medium business who is unaffordable for advertising. This article looks into basic features of high-value brand in terms of brand, positioning, brand name, product, packing, advertising slogan and concept. As a PCB manufacturer, NOD Electronics fully takes these principles into consideration during providing electronic manufacturing services to their customers.


1. Brand

Before word “brand” was invented by human, it’s more accurate to use “symbol” instead of it. Humans are symbolized animals. Symbol indicates significant meanings and profoundly impact human behavior. Otherwise, symbol controls human behavior and drives our consumption. 70% of logos were designed wrong, which takes customers into trouble. Brand logo should focus on benefits it brings, not how it comes out. Contained culture concepts in brand logo does not make any sense, because inappropriate symbol will increase cost while conveying it without voiceover. We only need original symbol in relation to brand.



2. Brand Name

The first principle of naming brand and product is cost. Obscure name involves high memory and spread cost. Brand name is a battle between super and non-super words. For example, Apple is a super word, but Dell not. The second principle of name is indication, which can call out brand value. Auditory words are recommended, because name is to be said, not looked at.



3. Positioning

When entering a supermarket, you will see 80% of products in non-mind-forces, ordinary and homogenous brands due to lack of marketplace positioning. You can imagine how worrying the organizations and staff back struggling brand look. This will become a root of fierce social turbulence. At very beginning of re-positioning is to place negative sticker onto your component brand, so as to build your own positive impression. It’s a warning for brand in low price business and without sufficient advertising budget. Unclear and non-positioning brand means to stay on bottom of business food chain and endure interest strikes. Positioning is likely to implant differentiation in minds of potential customers and should avoid any chaos and complex feelings, so the best way of entering customer mind is to simplify information. Some powerful advertisings focus on one word (such as Volvo: safe, BMW: drive). Listen up, do not attempt to send out all information and should focus on a strong differentiated concept and implant it into potential customer minds.



4. Concept

Try to ask yourself: will our product concept gain explosion effects in customer minds? When you state a concept, customer should admit quickly without any further explanation or demonstration. The conveying concept should be obvious and does not need time to think about. If a concept had no explosion effects or needed more explanation, it could not be good one. Explosion in mind stands for instant 100% acceptance without any question.



5. Advertising Slogan

Customer has a role of transmitter. Advertising is not intended to make him heard, but make him say to others. Brand advertising slogan should be secular. Every single man can blurt it out and act according to indications, which is the highest level of advertising. Start from folk slogan or become folk slogan. Advertising slogan is designed to let customer say it to his relatives and friends. Written language is only to “see” by our eyes, but customer spread relies on “say” and “listen”. So written language does not comply with customer auditory habits. Actually you have given up customer mouth to spread when you try to use written language.



6. Product

Product is made to realize the super word. If you can put value into name, do not let it appear in slogan. Otherwise, do not worry about long name. A long name with value is better than short name without value, because name has its own authority, but slogan is inferior.



7. Packing

Packing is the most powerful marketing plan. The purpose of creativeness is to “fix problem”, not "gain creativeness". Packing should stand on customer perspectives: A)The first issue you should think is how to highlight yourself on shelf, so you should take account of integrity and environment of product packing. B)The second issue is how to organize symbols and information. Keep the faith: I have no advertising and nobody knows me, but it can quickly communicate with customers and be sold out as long as I put packing onto shelf. If I can place picture on web site, it looks exciting without click to zoom in.

Do we believe the supplier shown on top of Google?

With a rapid competition of global marketplaces and the economic turnover, many suppliers turn their sights to website, particularly the SEO. So, they searched keywords, wrote content, built links and shared on SNS sites. After a couple of days, some of keywords got good performance and a growing traffic occurred. But question is: in light of a buyer, do we believe the top list supplier on Google?

We should confess that it's a convenient way to find supplier via Google, but how do we recognize which one is better? Here are some cases to share with you. NOD Electronics, 30-years experience in EMS industry, they paid a lot of attention to SEO. More importantly, they designed a fatanstic website and opened a lot of sections, such as PCB manufacturers, PCB prototype, PCB assembly, PCB design etc. You will find that all quality content are original, which will reflect that this company got high attitude to their customers. We should trust a supplier with this professional working attitudes.

Do we need quickness rather than price in terms of PCB international purchase?

With regard to PCB manufacturing market, there are a growing number of suppliers during past years. Now facing the competition, some of suppliers promoted their services to support as little as 20 hours PCB sample services even with zero cost. I have to doubt that: do we really need this kind of services?

In my opinion, global purchase commonly has its schedule in advance, so timeline is not the most important thing. Take NOD Electronics for example, their 20 hours PCB sample services did impress me.

In the future, we should pay more attention to sincere services such as one-stop from design to delivery of PCB.

How to get more customers for small business?

We are an electronic manufacturing services supplier for 10+ years. Our business reached global customers. In this passage, I'd like to share some experiences of how to get more customers from internet?

1. Build attractive web site
This is huge important to get high conversion rate of web traffic. Nowadays, you'd better to pay attention to online sales particularly on handset. With this obvious trend, internet thoughts have immersed into our daily life, industrial enterprises and almost everything. Importantly, the purchase decision markers have been becoming 80s and 90s. They are more likely to find suppliers via internet, rather than exhibition or business cards. So, web site is the portal of letting customer know your full aspects and determine if to send an inquiry online.

In our case, I published following customer concerned issues on our web site.

• What problems customer will meet?
• Why they occur?
• How to resolve them?
• What's the difference between other supplier and us?
• Who we are
• How we can control the quality
• What our clients say
• Related workflow and documents

2. Start to analyze keywords
Keywords selection is an art. They play crucial role in the long term business. Actually, we do NOT suggest to change page keywords once they are set down, because search engines will punish this action. Popularity, competition and business value are the dimensions of determining a keyword. We got our keywords, such as pcba, pcb manufacturer etc. from the methods below.

• Search engine matching keywords
• Professional long-tail keyword tool
• Google Adwords
• Competitor web site

3. Build quality content
Try to build hero pages on your website, which are the targets for SEO. Almost every search engine pay big proportion to original and quality content. So, to respect user experience is the key. Other SEO skills like keyword density, inbound links, page optimization etc. are not addressed here.

4. Find other outlets from internet
Professional forum, industrial portal, social media, B2B platform, video marketing are worthy of your concern. In this case, there are increasing visitors to your web site.

5. Enhance internal management
We don't want to lose customers for our reasons, such as bad internal management, unfriendly communication, unresponsive actions.

11 FREE PCB design softwares

1. PCBWeb Designer
PCBWeb is a free CAD application for designing and manufacturing electronics hardware. Design multi-sheet schematics with our fast and easy-to-use wiring tool. Route multi-layer boards with support for copper pours and DRC checking. Integrated Digi-Key Parts Catalog with Bill of Materials Manager.

2. ZenitPCB
Is an excellent pcb layout design software tool to create professional printed circuit board ( PCB ). It is a flexible easy to use CAD program, which allow you to realize your projects in a short time. With ZenitPCB Layout is possible to create the project starting both from the schematic capture or by the layout itself.

3. FreePCB
Is a free, open-source PCB design editor for Microsoft Windows. It was designed to be easy to learn and easy to use, yet capable of professional-quality work. Some of its features are: 1 to 16 copper layers, board size up to 60 inches by 60 inches, imports and exports PADS-PCB netlists and more

4. TinyCAD
Is a program to help you draw circuit diagrams. It comes complete with symbol libraries to get you started straight away. As well as being able to simply print your designs, you can use TinyCAD to publish your drawings by copying and pasting into a Word document or saving as a PNG bitmap for the web.

5. Osmond PCB
Is a flexible tool for designing printed circuit boards. It runs on Macintosh. Its many features include: virtually unlimited board sizes, number of board layers, number of parts, support for both through-hole and surface mount parts and more.

6. BSch3V
Is a schematic capture program for Windows. The name “BSch” is an abbreviation of “Basic Schematic”. It has only basic functions, in order to simplify operation.

7. ExpressPCB
Is a snap to learn and use. Laying out PCBs is easy, even for the first time user.

8. Kicad
Is an open source (GPL) software for the creation of electronic schematic diagrams and printed circuit board artwork. It is useful for everybody working in electronic design (schematic diagrams and Printed Board up to 16 layers).

9. gEDA
Runs on Linux and has produced tools which are used for electrical circuit design, schematic capture, simulation, prototyping, and production. Currently, the gEDA project offers a mature suite of free software applications for electronics design, including schematic capture, attribute management, bill of materials (BOM) generation, netlisting into over 20 netlist formats, analog and digital simulation, and printed circuit board PCB design layout.

10. Fritzing
Fritzing software is an interesting open-source initiative to support designers, artists, researchers and hobbyists to work creatively with interactive electronics and develop electronic projects. Fritzing helps you learn more about electronic circuits, to document your projects and even let’s you prepare them for production.

11. DesignSpark PCB
DesignSpark PCB is the world’s most accessible electronics design software. Easy to easy to learn and easy to use, it is designed to significantly reduce your concept-to-production time. At the core of this unique approach is a powerful software engine that enables you to capture Schematics, design PCB boards and layouts.

How to choose a reliable PCB assembly manufacturer?

No doubt,quality and price is the most important factors which you should consider.

1.Quality consistence—-How to control the quality? With this question, you’d better visit the  workshop  (especially SMT workshop) that you may choose them as your factory. Because whether the SMT workshop is small or large, the production could be produce, but the different is the quality consistence. Anti-static, moisture-proof and dust-proof is the three basic rules in the SMT workshop(It’s also most important). And the workshop should record operations with ISO9000. I have went to some workshop, the window is open!!! And you even shouldn’t wear shoe’s cover, hat and ESD wrist strap!!! They are big risks which would cause the problems in quality. Even though the production looks ok as leaving factory. But the failure rate would be increase after user use it in several mouths.

2.Price—-The price making is base on the component choosing and the cost of processing. So how to choose the best component with low prices is the crux of the matter. Although PCB assembly already contain component sourcing, you’d better communicate with your manufacturer positively about component sourcing. It not just save your money， but also make sure your production quality too.

3.Cooperate with manufacturer directly. As someone said “the most important thing is to make sure they have the processes in place that you need.” You should kown, many PCBA factories don’t have the processed you need but they still want get this business. So they take over your business then outsource it to someone else. It may bring many troubles you would’t want meet.