As a hardware designer, your job is to develop PCBs on time, within budget, and they need to work! In this article, we’ll focus on designing boards with manufacturing-in-mind so your boards cost less to make, but work just the same. Keep in mind that many of the tips below may not be feasible for your design. They’re meant as general guidelines to drive costs down if your design allows it.

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Keep all surface mount (SMT) components on one side of the board

If you have the real estate available, try keeping all of your SMT components on one side of the board. By doing so, your boards only have to go through the SMT manufacturing process once. If you have components on both sides of the boards, they have to go through twice. By eliminating a second SMT run, you save on manufacturing time and cost. Worthington Assembly’s CTO, Chris Denney, explains a bit more about this in the second episode of our podcast.

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Choose parts that can be easily substituted

When choosing components, try to pick ones that can be easily substituted with components that use the same footprint. While this won’t save you anything on the actual manufacturing cost, it will save you from having to redesign and respin the board if parts that cannot be substituted go out of stock. As most engineers know, avoiding a respin is in everyone’s best interest! Below are a few tips for picking parts that can be easily substituted:

1. Pick parts with a standard footprint to avoid needing to change your design every time a part goes obsolete. If your new substitute has the same footprint, you can simply approve a new part and you’re done!
2. Before picking a component, check on a few distributor websites to see if any of the parts are tagged as “obsolete” or “not recommended for new designs”. If they are, try using Octopart to search for similar parts that are active and in stock.

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Pick components that are 0402 size or larger

Picking a component that is smaller saves valuable board space but, there is a drawback to this design choice. At CircuitHub, we regularly place components smaller than 0402, however, they require more time and effort to pick and place correctly. This is reflected with a higher manufacturing cost.

Chris Denney’s analogy illustrates this well. If you’re an archer shooting an arrow at a 10-foot wide target, you don’t have to focus much to hit it. You can shoot arrows all day long without ever missing or using up your energy. But what if your target shrinks down to only 6 inches? Now you have to focus and take your time to hit that target. You’re not able to shoot at the same rate you could with the larger target unless you take the chance of missing. This is similar to manufacturing with components smaller than 0402, they take more time and effort to get just right, meaning it costs a bit more.

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Stay within our standard capabilities

Try to stay within our standard capabilities listed on our website. You’ll keep costs low and benefit from our auto-quoting feature. Although we regularly work on (and encourage) complex projects, they typically cost more to manufacture. Below are a few things to think about when designing your next project:

1. Use a standard stackup with standard materials.
2. Use between 2 - 4 layers if possible.
3. Keep your minimum trace/gap spacing within our standard spacing.
4. Avoid our special capabilities if possible.

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Try to use surface mount (SMT) instead of through-hole (THT) components

Whenever possible, use SMT components instead of through-hole. Not only will this reduce the cost to make your boards, it will reduce the lead time as well. SMT and THT components are treated almost entirely as separate manufacturing processes. Therefore, if you can use all SMT components on an entire design, you’ll eliminate the entire THT manufacturing process. Of course, this isn’t always a possibility but worth looking into.

There are two caveats to this approach:

1. Not all equivalent SMT and through-hole components are priced equally. Sometimes, SMT components cost more so you’ll have to weigh out the cost difference of manufacturing savings versus parts price. With CircuitHub’s instant quoting and transparent pricing, you can simply change the part in your design tool, upload a new revision, and see the cost difference right away.
2. If you’re looking to replace your through-hole connectors with an SMT equivalent, be careful if someone will be regularly handling the connectors. SMT parts do not have the mechanical strength that their THT counterparts do and generally cannot tolerate the same amount of wear and tear.

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If you follow the tips above, you’ll be designing with manufacturing-in-mind so your next project costs less to make, but works just as well. In a blog post soon to come, we’ll dive into more advanced tips for designing with manufacturing cost in mind. We’ll talk about laser drilling, castellated edges, gold fingers, and more!

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