Tag Archives: low cost electronics manufacture

PCB Design For Manufacture

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Design For Manufacture

Electronics products almost invariably have a Printed Circuit Board , PCB, on the inside. This is one of the most common things we do, designing the Printed Circuit Board on the inside on the product. Now designing a Printed Circuit Board so it works correctly is one thing, but if you are going to make them cost effectively in volume then you have to consider the manufacturing options at your disposal. To achieve Low Cost Electronics Manufacture requires every aspect of the design to be considered.

PCB Roach - an example of technology art

PCB Roach – an example of technology art

So the things to focus on are:

  • Use SMT as much as possible,
  • Reduce the number of components by using more highly integrated circuits,
  • Reduce the variety of components so the number of reels is reduced,
  • Ask the PCB loader about their standard panel sizes. If you can adjust the PCB size to suit them then it will reduce their costs,
  • Work with component types that the PCB loader can handle
  • Work with components that you can buy in suitable quantities

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years. For more information go to his LinkedIn profile at Ray Keefe. This post is Copyright © 2011 Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Printed Electronics

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Printed Electronics – A New Roadmap

The direction of Printed Electronics has taken an interesting new turn with the focus being no longer only on reducing production cost. Now the electronics industry is looking at product ideas that were previously thought to be impossible.

Printed Electronics

Printed Electronics

Some examples from The Future Of Printed Electronics shows previously unanticipated applications such as:

  • Nokia is developing Flexible Electronics that stretch
  • Companies such as Novacentrix are developing methods to directly Print Copper
  • Solar Cell electrode printing

The previously expected driver of Low Cost Electronics Manufacture is no longer the primary goal. Some of the above methods do reduce cost but the emerging trend is toward new product opportunities. This makes sense as markets tend to emerge and go through cycles until they are so commoditised that cost is the primary issue. We are at the beginning rather than the end of this cycle for Printed Electronics.

 

Printing of Organic Transistors and Organic PhotoVoltaic Solar Cells is still on the agenda so the market is diversifying in several interesting directions at the same time.

 

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years. For more information go to his LinkedIn profile at Ray Keefe. This post is Copyright © 2011 Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Casey Business Awards Finalist

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Casey Business Awards

The City Of Casey are holding their inaugural Casey Business Awards and at the Casey Business Breakfast this morning Successful Endeavours were nominated as finalists in two categories.

 

Casey Business Awards

The two Casey Business Awards categories are:

  • Manufacturer Of The Year
  • Business and Professional Services

We fall into the Business And Professional Services category with our Electronics and Embedded Software development services where we design products for Australian Electronics Manufacturers so they can achieve Low Cost Electronics Manufacture in Australia at a good profit margin.

The Manufacturer Of The Year award category recognises that for some of our clients, we also manufacture the product the product and delivered to them programmed, tested and calibrated; ready to sell. This includes products like a DNP3 enabled power controller product for the US Smart Grid market which is made right here in Berwick as well as the Award Winning Borgtech CPL2 Corrosion Protection Data Logger with Wireless Data Logging.

It was an honour to be recognised by our city council together with other small business owners in the City Of Casey, a municipality in the outer south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne. We will find out who the winners are on Friday 27th August at the Casey Business Awards gala dinner.

 

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years. For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

The Internet Turns 40 – Happy Birthday

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There are a lot of news feeds running this story. Here is one:

 

Timeline ABC News

 

And when the Internet first began, no-one knew what we would be doing with it today.

 

This has happened to a lot of other technologies. Low Cost Electronics and Low Power Design that can be Battery Operated has made many thing possible such as mobile phones, portable computers including netbooks, notebooks and laptops; portable media players, MP3 players, PDAs and the list has just begun.

 

But where is it going? Realistically, you need a few things to come together and the environment and carbon footprint considerations now sit alongside the more traditional requirements such as:

  • Low Cost Electronics Manufacture
  • Low Power Electronics Design
  • Design Tool Productivity improvements
  • Electronic Design Automation
  • Increased Processing Power per milliwatt (mW)
  • Embedded Software of immense complexity and flexibility
  • Flexible circuits
  • Transparent Electronics
  • Compact component size
  • Reduced Polluting and Increased Recyclability and reuse

Vernor Vinge looked into what might become of this in his book Rainbows End which I recommend as a good read and full of well thought out ideas about how augmented reality might operate including concepts such as wearable computers, gesture recognition, graphic overlays, the equivalent of doing a Google search on any object in your field of view, and other ideas like that. It is set 20 years from now.

 

The most interesting for me was the way work was conducted in the future and how much advantage there was in having 100,000 people as affiliates on a program. Pay is based on royalties for contributions. You choose what you join and contribute to. Your income directly reflects the product of your contribution and your negotiated royalty rate. A large company has 3 direct employees and everyone else is an affiliate on one or more programs of work. This produces phenomenal synergies.

 

It will be very interesting indeed to see how much of his vision matches the future.

 

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years. For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

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Electronics Manufacture Shines in Melbourne

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National recognition for local Casey Business

OK, I couldn’t resist that blog title or this headline. It isn’t often you get a chance to say something like that. If you hadn’t heard yet, we are finalists in two categories in the EDN Innovation Awards for 2009. Melbourne is the Electronics Manufacturing capital of Australia and we are based in Narre Warren which is administered by the City of Casey.

 

Electronics Manufacturing

Our aim is to turn Australian Electronics Manufacture into Low Cost Electronics Manufacture through improving the total cost of a product throughout its life cycle. This is not a quality reduction process. Quite the opposite. Getting the product right so it doesn’t fail and does do what it is meant to do is one of the things necessary to reducing cost.

 

Located on the outskirts of Melbourne we primarily serve Melbourne based Electronics Manufacturers by providing them with Electronics and Embedded Software Development services that save them up to 70% compared to traditional linear Product Development.

 

So how do we do that?

 

Firstly, there are a few blog posts you can refer back to that will fill in some of the details.

 

Successful Product Development

Australian Electronics Manufacturing

Low Cost Electronics Manufacture in Australia that competes favourable with China is feasible. Ignoring the trade offs discussed in the links above, the steps to take are:

  • Identify the primary priority – is it time, cost, performance?
  • Reviews costs – all the costs – see the last link above if you are sure what they all are
  • Reduce Cost through redesign to remove unnecessary labour and to streamline manufacture
  • Implement
  • Deploy
  • Monitor and correct as required

Written like this it sounds simple, and conceptually it is. Where it gets lost is in the assumption that it can’t be that simple. But there aren’t any hidden traps in this process.

 

We have had a few queries about how we came up with our company name, Successful Endeavours. Next post I will reveal all.

 

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years. For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

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