Marcy’s Musings: The Power of the Electronics Ecosystem
Powering the Future: Performance Is Won in Assembly
Dack: How does it work if there's a change?
Johnson: Let me walk you all the way through the order process, then we'll go back and we'll answer every question. You click on the order button and it can place the order; there's interactive feedback from us during the order process. They place the order, we build the boards, and their Gerber files for that order are then available for them to download from us, free of charge, to create the archive information on their design.
Dack: Is this new?
Johnson: As of January 1, 2015.
Dack: This seems almost amazing, because it makes sense that using your services would result in a board that you provide. But now it seems like you're opening up the design for the customer to be able to use those Gerber files, and go anywhere to have it fabricated.
Johnson: Absolutely.
Dack: You're certain that they'll stay with Sunstone because of your great service?
Johnson: You're reading my mind. We feel that we offer a fantastic board fabrication service that will win the customers over. I think we see that in the retention rate for PCB123; customers use it for the first time and they come back and they order more and more. They also may order different designs using different tools; we make no presumptions that we're the only tool for everybody. Sunstone builds all sorts of boards from all sorts of CAD tools. The customer is free to choose the tool that's right for them, but with Sunstone's manufacturing capabilities and our specialty in doing prototype work with fast turn times when you need it, and our on-time 100% guarantee with no strings attached, and our on-time record that is well in excess of 99.5%. We're that sort of supplier, and we believe that this quality of service will keep them there, even though we may give them Gerbers for their design.
Dack: What are some of the delivery parameters? What are your turn times and what can we expect as far as capabilities, layer counts, etc.?
Johnson: Specific to PCB123—obviously Sunstone can do larger than that—but within PCB123 we pretty much default to six layers, although if somebody wants to do eight layers, we can help them with that. It seems to fit for our normal capabilities. The database underneath that, of course, can go a lot larger than that if there is a need, but that seems to fit where our customers are most often doing their work. Six to eight layers would be the normal layer count capabilities.
Dack: Turn times?
Johnson: I would refer customers to our website for other manufacturing capabilities like trace and space, down in the 6 and 5 mil range. Turn times of anywhere from 24 hours to four days is typical. If a customer needs to talk to us about a longer lead time than that, then I would encourage them to call our customer service representatives, and they're on the phone 24/7/365. They can certainly talk through any customer’s options.
Dack: Sounds like a great service. I hope many of our engineers out there will take a look. So, let's close out here with the evolution of PCB123. Really briefly, where are you going now?
Johnson: We'll be coming out with a new version, 5.2. That particular version contains a lot of work to speed up the graphics processing on the board. While the tool has generally been very responsive to begin with, now it is becoming downright lightning fast in the rendering for its graphics on the layout side, as well as the schematic side. That just means that customers are going to be able to move that much faster, and have more complex designs move through in a much zippier fashion. It's really a delightful tool to use.
Dack: Great talking with you, Nolan. Thanks for your time.
Johnson: Thank you, Kelly.
Sunstone helped aerospace engineer Miki Szmuk to build highly functional PCBs for small, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). View case study here.
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