|
|
The production process plays a very important role in the development and evolution of an electronic product, having an impact on its quality and costs. It is essential then to take it into account from the beginning of the designing stage.
Due to the shorter and shorter life of electronic components, manufacturing electronic boards and systems requires often new product releases and redesigns over time to ensure a long product life. Overall product life time is usually longer then the one of its electronics components and subsystems. The choice of components during the design phase must then be done with a careful attention to the expected life of the products and to the process planned for manufacturing.
Moreover, all the possible partial redesigns can even represent an opportunity to update the product both to increase functionality and reduce costs. If the possible redesign needs are carefully planned during the design phase, the cost of re-engineering can be close to zero or even become a chance of cost improvement.
The electronic components are being continually reduced in their size, which translates into a true challenge in building prototypes with the need of expensive equipments, the same as those used for mass production (screen printing frame, assembly programmes, inspection and testing, assembly machines and re-manufacturing). This trend imposes non-recurrent costs in the prototyping and pre-production process higher than in the past.
It has become quite common manufacturing small amounts of pre-production products rather than few manual prototypes, thus already having the production process validated during the design stage.
Moreover the shift of manufacturing to lower labour cost countries is likely to result into the disappearance of design skills overtime, because today’s manufacturers will probably become tomorrow’s designers.
"Design for production" is only possible if the appropriate know-how and experience in manufacturing is available already during the design phase.
"Design for manufacturing and testability" is today an essential strategy to create industrial products with quality, reliability, robustness at competitive costs and short time-to-market.
By tightly coupling all stages of design and manufacturing, PRIMA ELECTRONICS delivers to its customers industrial-grade products at competitive costs and fast time-to-market.
Since 1998 PRIMA ELECTRONICS, in order to ensure quality and reliability, has internalised pre-assembling activities, thus having complete control all over the stages of the production process. This decision has led to a measurable quality improvement.
Thanks to a highly automated electronic production process, PRIMA ELECTRONICS can also leverage on product cost competitiveness. In essence, the most effective way to make quality products at the desired cost is having in mind products manufacturing during the design process, anticipating production needs and reducing time-to-market.