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DFM Tips
Our top Design For Manufacturing tips for engineers and technologists.
- Tips to Speed Turnaround on Electronic Prototypes
The best prototypes are of high quality and are turned around very quickly, to ensure that you can get back to work on your design with minimal downtime. This DFM Tip provides a checklist of straight-forward things you can do to speed the turn-around (and help ensure the quality) of your prototype PCB.
- System Assembly Considerations: “Hands-on” Means Higher Costs
One of the most expensive, yet overlooked, aspects of assembly is the manual tasks involved in putting a whole product together. To control costs, it’s desirable to automate as many procedures in the assembly chain as possible. If automation for a specific part of the process is not an option, then a designer must try to minimize the amount of manual work required in getting to the “finished goods” stage.
This DFM Tip provides practical guidelines for designers to ensure their product requires minimal hands-on assembly.
- Guidelines for Design of Metal Fabrication & Mechanical Assembly Operations
This provides best practices – and reasons for them – related to design considerations that are specific to metal and mechanical sub-assemblies.
- Using Concurrent Engineering for Better Results
Broadly speaking, there are two general approaches to product engineering: the “silo” approach, and the “concurrent engineering” approach. At OCM Manufacturing, we advocate concurrent engineering; while it requires a greater level of communication and collaboration, the results are far superior – for both the customer and for the contract manufacturer.
This DFM Tip describes how concurrent engineering works and provides three best practices for implementing this approach in your environment.
- Designing to Reduce Inventory Costs
Inventory control represents one of the highest cost areas in the manufacturing supply chain. Whether you are outsourcing the complete supply chain and manufacturing of your product in a turnkey model or using a consignment model, a number of design considerations can help to reduce the hard costs, overhead, and risk of inventory.
This DFM tip provides some best-design-practices for reducing inventory risk and cost.
- Planning Your Test Strategy
While testing is one of the last steps in the manufacturing process, it must be planned for early – as part of the design process – in order to ensure that necessary tests can be carried out and that they can be done so cost-effectively.
This DFM tip provides best practices for planning the test strategy for your electronics device.
- Best Practices for Preparing Documentation
As a contract electronics manufacturer, OCM Manufacturing relies on documentation provided by our clients to understand the services we need to perform. Documentation includes files such as design schematics, assembly drawings, test procedures, bills of materials and more. Problems or omissions in this documentation result in delays and, in extreme cases, may lead to product deficiencies and quality issues. The following best practices will help to ensure that the documentation you send to your contract manufacturer is in good order.
- Best Practices for Surface Mount Technology (SMT) Design
Increasingly fine-pitch devices and increasing levels of automation are resulting in greater density in board design than ever before.
This tip provides best practices that will help ensure that an SMT device is manufacturable.
- Best Practices for Double-Sided Mixed-Technology Board Design
Although Pin Through Hole (PTH) designs are being phased out in favor of Surface Mount Technology (SMT, many designs still mix PTH and SMT. PTH also remains in use for some heavy power connectors, transformers, and other devices where strong mechanical bonds are required.
This tip outlines some key best practices for double-sided, mixed-technology design.
- Optimizing Board Design for Adequate Clamping Space
Two common oversights related to board design affect whether the manufacturing equipment can effectively process a board. Whether your board is manufactured using pin through hole (PTH) or surface mount technology (SMT), the manufacturing equipment requires certain space on the board for clamping, transport, and/or supporting its weight. This tip provides rules of thumb for meeting these requirements while still optimizing board space.
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