Production Scenarios
Silicon Engines has a lot of experience helping to put designs into volume production. Hundreds of thousands of circuit boards that we’ve designed have been built and shipped into diverse market applications.
We’ve worked with a number of volume production arrangements. Here are some example scenarios:
- Customer is the manufacturer. Our client runs his own electronics manufacturing operation—including parts purchasing, inventory control, high-volume board-stuffing machinery, and final test and repair.
- Customer uses a domestic electronics contract manufacturer. Our client manufactures a medium-volume product which may not be primarily electronic, but which uses electronic circuit boards. He contracts circuit board manufacturing to a local contract manufacturer. The CM purchases parts, assembles and test PCBs, and delivers them to our client, who incorporates them into his product.
- Customer uses an off-shore CM. Our client manufactures a high-volume product and has circuit boards—or entire products—manufactured off-shore.
- Silicon Engines acts as virtual manufacturer. We handle parts purchasing and PCB assembly using a domestic or off-shore CM, and deliver final product to our customer, ready to sell.
Preparing for Production
The typical progression of a project, moving toward production, starts in the engineering phase.
- Alpha prototypes: First articles, for use in the development process. Typically hand built in very small quantities. Though the first prototypes almost never make it into production, whenever possible we aim to include all production-intent features, in a production-intent package, so as to minimize extra design stages. We pay close attention to component lead-times and costs.
- Beta prototypes: Units that correct issues discovered during the testing of alpha prototypes, and are suitable for preliminary testing in the actual end-user environment. Feedback from end-users is very valuable to ensure that the production product will be reliable and meet customer expectations.
- Pilot production units: Units that are production-intent with respect to all features and functions. A typical unit quantity might be 100 units. These are preferably built at the facility where volume production will take place, in order to refine the assembly and test process before full-scale production begins.
- Production: Full-scale production starts.
Production Partners
We have worked with a variety of contract manufacturers, both domestic and off-shore. See our partners page for more information.
Support in the Production Phase
Our role as a design engineering firm typically doesn’t end when the product first ships. We provide a variety of support services during the production phase:
- Updating software to add new features.
- Helping with field service, addressing unanticipated issues discovered in the field, assisting with debugging and product updates.
- Finding second sources for parts in short supply.
- Finding pin-compatible replacements for obsolete parts, or redesigning to accommodate newer parts that aren’t fully backwards-compatible.