This is painful. They got a used solder mask holder, a Lumen pick and place machine, a bunch of old Siemens feeders, and a small automatic reflow oven. All these tools needed major work. Everything with firmware needed firmware mods. Everything else needed assembly or major cleaning. Everything needed adjustment. They had to 3D print their own solder paste squeegee. They're six months in and still trying to produce one simple board.
I've been down this road of populating a surface mount board. There is a minimum size for a practical board-stuffing operation, and they are below it. They are using prototype techniques for 100 units or so, not techniques that scale.
Surface mount soldering requires applying hot air in a very controlled way, with the temperature ramping up, holding at the high temp for a few seconds, and then ramping down. On a small scale, you have a programmable oven which tries to do that. Those always have heat distribution problems. For production, you have a tunnel oven, with about six sections at different temperatures and a chain conveyor to take the boards through the tunnel. With the tunnel oven, you let the whole thing warm up and stabilize, and when all zones are at the right temperature, you can repeatably solder boards successfully.
They're using a hobbyist-grade pick and place machine. Slow, but cheap. Plus the software isn't ready for prime time. They looked at a used production machine. Runs Windows XP and wouldn't fit through the door. Rejected that.
They're about EUR 30,000 into this, not counting their own labor.
This approach is not going to revive electronics in Europe.
Learning by mistake isn't painful; it is how you learn best. I keep iterating on that point to my children. But that isn't merely what these guys were doing. They were doing more, since they were documenting their (expensive!) learning process. Documenting your learning process and sharing it freely is allowing others to not make the very same mistakes, but to do better instead. It lowers the barrier of entry for competition, taunting competition who hopefully also share back. Like many talks on 39c3 (esp. the lightning talks), it is an invitation to collaboration.
Sharing the documentation is also an act of compassion, and very much in the spirit of FOSS & OSHW.
This talk was hands down my favourite talk (and not even in a subject I am familiar with!). These two guys shared a lot of info in little time, and were very humble. It was also a presentation which contains a political component (Europe's lack of independence, specifically hardware-wise), but it managed to avoid that discussion. Why, because it is assumed the attending public shares the same value. Instead, it maintains focus on the taking action part. I am not sure everyone here shares said value, but I do, and for whatever it is worth: USA is in a similar boat.
You are saying the same thing they said -- it doesn't scale. It's not how you build a large factory. They acknowledge this and pretty quickly move on to say that they are aiming for smaller and sustainable.
They even specifically call out why they chose not to use a conveyor based oven in the video.
Basically they believe they can be price reasonable at small scales, small batches. Build process knowledge and expertise over time, and then incrementally scale up after assessing bottlenecks.
I think the route of local sustainable, grow as needed or collaborate to expand capacity is pretty reasonable.
It's not possible to make a competitively priced product that way.
What are you going to do, sell artisanal circuit boards on Etsy?
Here's a small US-based PCB board and assembly facility in the US, in Hesperia, California.[1]
Looks like it might have 20 to 30 employees from the building picture.
This is probably about as small as a viable business of this type gets. It doesn't have to be done in a huge plant like JLCPCB in Shenzhen.
Here's a company in India, Invariance, which makes low-cost semi-automatic machines to do exactly the same operations 39c3 is doing.[2] They have three machines - a solder paste spreader, a pick and place machine, and a mini tunnel reflow oven. They make all three machines.
These machines intended for small companies who want to assemble their own boards in house. The solder paste spreader is just automated enough to do a consistent job, with pressure and timing controlled. The pick and place machine uses their own feeder design which runs off strips of component tape. The tunnel oven is small, only about a meter long.
That's close to a viable minimum production solution.
39c3 is the conference it is being presented at, not the presenter. 39th Chaos Communication Congress, the annual conference of the Chaos Computer Club.
This is a hacker messing around who is presenting to inspire others and get feedback. Many things presented at Xc3 are wildly impractical, potentially illegal, or not even technical at all and more on the side of activism and policy. Most are interesting and fun, which is the main goal.
That depends on your definition of "competitive", doesn't it?
Being 3x as expensive as China but 0.1x as expensive as current small-scale EU manufacturing can be extremely competitive. Plenty of people looking for <1000 unit runs would be willing to pay extra for a "made in EU" label.
Technically the differentiation isn't cost reduction its in shored manufacturer. That can become an important requirement as firms become more wary of IP theft and other issues.
Besides other than that what can you really differentiate in this field that isn't cost? Its a service that is standardized regardless of country. Maybe you can provide different "styles" of boards (ie. different specs) or improve the entire submit to production pipeline but thats about it.
Design for manufacturability means you leave tolerance within Factory limits, and your own prototyping process limits.
While an inexpensive PnP machine will do 50k to 80k components/hour. If you have someone doing _any_ task, than add $3 USD * number of operations per unit.
Tech is a low-margin business with a lot of regulations, and should be contracted to a proper facility if making over a few thousand units a month. Tooling up for a production line is almost always a bad idea, as it usually adds additional barriers to a product launch as people get sidetracked. =3
Hi! Augustin here, one of the presenters of the talk: Alex actually built a vapour phase soldering oven from scratch a few years ago! Indeed they are not exactly practical for series production, though they are amazing for small runs of very challenging to solder board though.
Main issues is solvent recovery: as another commenter pointed out, Galden is very expensive, and it is also extremely greenhouse inducing and we were not confident in our ability to recover it completely, especially at "scale" (100 boards per month or so).
In our case, we picked a hot-air convection oven, which, while not as good as VPS, is still a lot better than IR at not burning components. Our main challenge is always space, so we went for a production batch oven which already has more throughput than we need for us to get to profitability.
The plan is to upgrade to a long and big conveyor oven once we move to a bigger facility, these are quite cheap and they are compatible with a fully automated production line.
Ngl, everything on crowd supply is overpriced. I bought an sdr through them several months ago, and the antenna I bought with it could be found on mouser for at least $10 cheaper.
Electronics in Europe is so dead. It is past the point where where it can be revived. One thing is sick overregulation to spin hardware product. Last nail in the coffin today is Cyber Resilience Act. It dwarfs all the regulations before it.
Second thing is talent. People can’t hardware anymore. I mean putting a 0402 capacitor on the printed circuit board is not hard. But doing that in meaningful way gets hard. As a contractor I designed few boards and optimized for production in China. In my dayjob colleagues are stuck in the last century. No recent knowledge about parts, design rules, testing principles… No willingness to learn and talk to Chinese manufacturers about optimization. Just copy paste bad decisions from old boards to new designs.
Honestly I wouldn’t even try to revive anything in Europe. Chinese electronics factories are way too far in the future. The suppliers for my workplace are all stuck in the past. Even the ones with new equipment struggle to use full potential due to worker’s shortage. Which is probably a problem in whole western world. Who wants to be manufacturing technician when you can be lifestyle influencer!?
>Who wants to be manufacturing technician when you can be lifestyle influencer!?
Before influencers people wanted to be actors. It predates the time before Electronics was 'lost' in Europe so thats not a convincing argument.
What you are saying really is that the world enjoys what we have on the backs of inadequately paid production engineers in China. As their demographic crisis does not produce a similar sized replacement generation, that benefit will go away as experts retire and no one replaces them. So one way or another wages will go up meaning inflation will go up and some of those 'lifestyle influencers' will now consider the field because it is a viable career path in terms of pay.
The regulations argument is a red herring: those mostly apply to electronics products sold in the EU, not manufactured in the EU. You have exactly the same burden trying to sell CN-manufactured hardware in the EU.
Worker's shortage is a real problem in China as well. Their approach? Automate everything. Focus on manufacturing 1000s of designs using a handful of standard formulas, instead of treating every design as bespoke. There's no reason this couldn't be done in the EU.
It's going to require a serious cultural shift, but given the right incentive I see no reason why it would be impossible.
> You have exactly the same burden trying to sell CN-manufactured hardware in the EU.
Not if you're a Chinese OEM: you just mail it in, and thanks to the arcane operation of international postage it's cheaper to post to Germany from China than from Germany. CE is such a European type of regulation, there's almost no enforcement, while at the same time it's so vague that simply working out what directives you might need to comply with is time-consuming.
Mind you as others have pointed out, there is still EU electronics. It's just not massive production runs for consumer electronics, much more of it is for defence, aerospace, and medical. And a bit of automotive, although that is definitely going to fall to Chinese car OEMs.
Europe is starting crack down on individual CN import - for exactly this reason. But that's still not going to solve the real problems EU-based hardware companies run into.
The whole problem is that the EU electronics industy is laser-focused on those defence and aerospace runs. They expect everything to be bespoke and complicated, so their entire business model is built around it.
But the vast majority of hardware isn't that complicated. I don't want a two-month ordering process with a "call for pricing" and a €1500 "engineering fee" - I want a JLCPCB-like instant quote and click-to-order for my dime-a-dozen 4-layer 10x10cm prototype!
The fact that a handful of industy giant are still doing production in Europe while moving at a glacial pace is not that relevant when China is rapidly out-innovating the West. If it continues like this, they will eventually die too.
Funfact: If you are working in the industry, you know that there are many companies who produce electronics in Europe in general and some even in Germany.
As far as I am aware the European plants survive mostly on decent QA and regulated industries. When the cost of a defect slipping QA is high, it can be cheaper to operate European plant with intra-step quality controls than manufacture in China and slap thorough QA on top.
The problem is the gap between hobbyist project and hundred-thousand-unit production run.
You can't easily and cheaply get 10, 100, or 1000 units manufactured in the EU the way you can in China. This pretty much kills hardware startups and scaleups wanting to do local manufacturing.
If you're not a multinational or have an essentially-unlimited budget for your small-scale run, you have to outsource it to China.
I work with companies, which have a more like small scale production. They are about 100 or so workers. Yes, this is also possible. They grew their business in the last 25 years, when it was even harder to produce something than these days. At least one of these business have PCB suppliers in the EU, which helped them in the post COVID crises where everybody struggled with supply.
I just named some big name brands. I also know mid-size and smaller brands.
Building your business and getting your stuff together is hard for any startup in any business field.
Could you perhaps share those PCBA businesses with us?
I tried quite hard to find them when I was still in the hardware world, and I never managed to find anything even remotely close to what China offers at less than 10x the price.
I'd love to give it another shot for some hobby projects if the industry has indeed changed in the last few years!
Not sure why your post was buried. As the EU does have a lot of rules, but if a product is reasonably made its almost the same cost as the US market entry. Robert Feranec covers a lot of the more obscure EU rules:
Designs that contain China parts are often immediately disqualified from most trade exemptions. The landed cost can bump gadget retail prices too high in some countries. YMMV =3
i was looking it up and the 12th biggest pcb manufacture is in austria. which is europa afaik. Its not that dead
"In Leoben befindet sich das weltweite Headquarter von AT&S. Derzeit gibt es drei Produktionslinien, die eine Reihe von verschiedenen ML/HDI Highend-Leiterplatten, Embedded Lösungen für Power Applikationen vor allem im Server Bereich und Cores für die IC-Substratwerke herstellen. Weiteres werden spezielle Technologien für Aviation & Satellites, Industrie, Automotive und den IC-Markt entwickelt und gefertigt.
Mitarbeiter: 1.759
Eröffnung: 1982
Fokus:
Automotive, Aviation, Industrial, Medical, Communication, Consumer, Computer, Semicon
Ein neues Werk, das derzeit gebaut wird, wird auch die Produktion von IC-Substraten nach Leoben bringen, einschließlich bedeutsamer Kapazitäten für Forschung und Entwicklung. Mit dem neuen Werk werden rund 700 neue Arbeitsplätze geschaffen, wodurch sich die Zahl der Mitarbeiter:innen nahezu verdoppeln wird.
Reminds me that comma.ai has its own line. While their setup is quite expensive they do run production for a smartphone-level of difficulty in-house. They detail it incredibly well at commacon [0].
What I really would love is a JLCPCB equivalent in Europe. Slightly higher prices are OK, but I want to have the the Same amount of process automation and flexibility.
Should be good for a scale of a few thousend per year.
Hi! Have you every checked out aisler.net? In my opinion they do an amazing job, it's not quite JLCPCB prices, but maybe only 20% higher depending on what service you take, and they deliver faster since they are based in europe.
Their business model is pooling small orders and sending them to board fabs in europe, mainly germany and some in the east.
Aisler is decent for bare boards, but their PCBA is several orders of magnitude more expensive due to the setup & handling fees. JLCPCB has this down to a science, with their preloaded (and therefore dirt-cheap) "basic parts" and pre-approved "extended parts" pulled directly from LCSC for a small fee.
On top of that they also offer 3D printing, CNC machining, sheet metal bending, and even a McMaster-Carr-like parts store. It is literally a one-stop-shop for all your hardware prototype needs.
This is painful. They got a used solder mask holder, a Lumen pick and place machine, a bunch of old Siemens feeders, and a small automatic reflow oven. All these tools needed major work. Everything with firmware needed firmware mods. Everything else needed assembly or major cleaning. Everything needed adjustment. They had to 3D print their own solder paste squeegee. They're six months in and still trying to produce one simple board.
I've been down this road of populating a surface mount board. There is a minimum size for a practical board-stuffing operation, and they are below it. They are using prototype techniques for 100 units or so, not techniques that scale.
Surface mount soldering requires applying hot air in a very controlled way, with the temperature ramping up, holding at the high temp for a few seconds, and then ramping down. On a small scale, you have a programmable oven which tries to do that. Those always have heat distribution problems. For production, you have a tunnel oven, with about six sections at different temperatures and a chain conveyor to take the boards through the tunnel. With the tunnel oven, you let the whole thing warm up and stabilize, and when all zones are at the right temperature, you can repeatably solder boards successfully.
They're using a hobbyist-grade pick and place machine. Slow, but cheap. Plus the software isn't ready for prime time. They looked at a used production machine. Runs Windows XP and wouldn't fit through the door. Rejected that.
They're about EUR 30,000 into this, not counting their own labor. This approach is not going to revive electronics in Europe.
Learning by mistake isn't painful; it is how you learn best. I keep iterating on that point to my children. But that isn't merely what these guys were doing. They were doing more, since they were documenting their (expensive!) learning process. Documenting your learning process and sharing it freely is allowing others to not make the very same mistakes, but to do better instead. It lowers the barrier of entry for competition, taunting competition who hopefully also share back. Like many talks on 39c3 (esp. the lightning talks), it is an invitation to collaboration.
Sharing the documentation is also an act of compassion, and very much in the spirit of FOSS & OSHW.
This talk was hands down my favourite talk (and not even in a subject I am familiar with!). These two guys shared a lot of info in little time, and were very humble. It was also a presentation which contains a political component (Europe's lack of independence, specifically hardware-wise), but it managed to avoid that discussion. Why, because it is assumed the attending public shares the same value. Instead, it maintains focus on the taking action part. I am not sure everyone here shares said value, but I do, and for whatever it is worth: USA is in a similar boat.
You are saying the same thing they said -- it doesn't scale. It's not how you build a large factory. They acknowledge this and pretty quickly move on to say that they are aiming for smaller and sustainable.
They even specifically call out why they chose not to use a conveyor based oven in the video.
Basically they believe they can be price reasonable at small scales, small batches. Build process knowledge and expertise over time, and then incrementally scale up after assessing bottlenecks.
I think the route of local sustainable, grow as needed or collaborate to expand capacity is pretty reasonable.
It's not possible to make a competitively priced product that way. What are you going to do, sell artisanal circuit boards on Etsy?
Here's a small US-based PCB board and assembly facility in the US, in Hesperia, California.[1] Looks like it might have 20 to 30 employees from the building picture. This is probably about as small as a viable business of this type gets. It doesn't have to be done in a huge plant like JLCPCB in Shenzhen.
Here's a company in India, Invariance, which makes low-cost semi-automatic machines to do exactly the same operations 39c3 is doing.[2] They have three machines - a solder paste spreader, a pick and place machine, and a mini tunnel reflow oven. They make all three machines. These machines intended for small companies who want to assemble their own boards in house. The solder paste spreader is just automated enough to do a consistent job, with pressure and timing controlled. The pick and place machine uses their own feeder design which runs off strips of component tape. The tunnel oven is small, only about a meter long.
That's close to a viable minimum production solution.
[1] https://mermarinc.com/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_VCJyeqa-A
39c3 is the conference it is being presented at, not the presenter. 39th Chaos Communication Congress, the annual conference of the Chaos Computer Club.
This is a hacker messing around who is presenting to inspire others and get feedback. Many things presented at Xc3 are wildly impractical, potentially illegal, or not even technical at all and more on the side of activism and policy. Most are interesting and fun, which is the main goal.
That depends on your definition of "competitive", doesn't it?
Being 3x as expensive as China but 0.1x as expensive as current small-scale EU manufacturing can be extremely competitive. Plenty of people looking for <1000 unit runs would be willing to pay extra for a "made in EU" label.
If the only service a CM brings to the table is cost reduction, than its a doomed business model.
Rule #23: Don't compete to be at the bottom, as you just might actually win.
Have a great day =3
Technically the differentiation isn't cost reduction its in shored manufacturer. That can become an important requirement as firms become more wary of IP theft and other issues.
Besides other than that what can you really differentiate in this field that isn't cost? Its a service that is standardized regardless of country. Maybe you can provide different "styles" of boards (ie. different specs) or improve the entire submit to production pipeline but thats about it.
For that, there's a company named eurocircuits. Slightly more expensive than JLCPCB, but not 30x.
Design for manufacturability means you leave tolerance within Factory limits, and your own prototyping process limits.
While an inexpensive PnP machine will do 50k to 80k components/hour. If you have someone doing _any_ task, than add $3 USD * number of operations per unit.
Tech is a low-margin business with a lot of regulations, and should be contracted to a proper facility if making over a few thousand units a month. Tooling up for a production line is almost always a bad idea, as it usually adds additional barriers to a product launch as people get sidetracked. =3
Hobbyist vapour phase reflow ovens exist although not cheap: https://eleshop.eu/vaporflow-275-vapour-phase-reflow-oven.ht...
Hi! Augustin here, one of the presenters of the talk: Alex actually built a vapour phase soldering oven from scratch a few years ago! Indeed they are not exactly practical for series production, though they are amazing for small runs of very challenging to solder board though.
Main issues is solvent recovery: as another commenter pointed out, Galden is very expensive, and it is also extremely greenhouse inducing and we were not confident in our ability to recover it completely, especially at "scale" (100 boards per month or so).
In our case, we picked a hot-air convection oven, which, while not as good as VPS, is still a lot better than IR at not burning components. Our main challenge is always space, so we went for a production batch oven which already has more throughput than we need for us to get to profitability.
The plan is to upgrade to a long and big conveyor oven once we move to a bigger facility, these are quite cheap and they are compatible with a fully automated production line.
Bit pricier https://www.crowdsupply.com/pcb-arts/vapor-phase-one
Ngl, everything on crowd supply is overpriced. I bought an sdr through them several months ago, and the antenna I bought with it could be found on mouser for at least $10 cheaper.
The working fluid for that thing costs EUR205/liter. Ouch.
Electronics in Europe is so dead. It is past the point where where it can be revived. One thing is sick overregulation to spin hardware product. Last nail in the coffin today is Cyber Resilience Act. It dwarfs all the regulations before it.
Second thing is talent. People can’t hardware anymore. I mean putting a 0402 capacitor on the printed circuit board is not hard. But doing that in meaningful way gets hard. As a contractor I designed few boards and optimized for production in China. In my dayjob colleagues are stuck in the last century. No recent knowledge about parts, design rules, testing principles… No willingness to learn and talk to Chinese manufacturers about optimization. Just copy paste bad decisions from old boards to new designs.
Honestly I wouldn’t even try to revive anything in Europe. Chinese electronics factories are way too far in the future. The suppliers for my workplace are all stuck in the past. Even the ones with new equipment struggle to use full potential due to worker’s shortage. Which is probably a problem in whole western world. Who wants to be manufacturing technician when you can be lifestyle influencer!?
>Who wants to be manufacturing technician when you can be lifestyle influencer!?
Before influencers people wanted to be actors. It predates the time before Electronics was 'lost' in Europe so thats not a convincing argument.
What you are saying really is that the world enjoys what we have on the backs of inadequately paid production engineers in China. As their demographic crisis does not produce a similar sized replacement generation, that benefit will go away as experts retire and no one replaces them. So one way or another wages will go up meaning inflation will go up and some of those 'lifestyle influencers' will now consider the field because it is a viable career path in terms of pay.
The regulations argument is a red herring: those mostly apply to electronics products sold in the EU, not manufactured in the EU. You have exactly the same burden trying to sell CN-manufactured hardware in the EU.
Worker's shortage is a real problem in China as well. Their approach? Automate everything. Focus on manufacturing 1000s of designs using a handful of standard formulas, instead of treating every design as bespoke. There's no reason this couldn't be done in the EU.
It's going to require a serious cultural shift, but given the right incentive I see no reason why it would be impossible.
> You have exactly the same burden trying to sell CN-manufactured hardware in the EU.
Not if you're a Chinese OEM: you just mail it in, and thanks to the arcane operation of international postage it's cheaper to post to Germany from China than from Germany. CE is such a European type of regulation, there's almost no enforcement, while at the same time it's so vague that simply working out what directives you might need to comply with is time-consuming.
Mind you as others have pointed out, there is still EU electronics. It's just not massive production runs for consumer electronics, much more of it is for defence, aerospace, and medical. And a bit of automotive, although that is definitely going to fall to Chinese car OEMs.
Europe is starting crack down on individual CN import - for exactly this reason. But that's still not going to solve the real problems EU-based hardware companies run into.
The whole problem is that the EU electronics industy is laser-focused on those defence and aerospace runs. They expect everything to be bespoke and complicated, so their entire business model is built around it.
But the vast majority of hardware isn't that complicated. I don't want a two-month ordering process with a "call for pricing" and a €1500 "engineering fee" - I want a JLCPCB-like instant quote and click-to-order for my dime-a-dozen 4-layer 10x10cm prototype!
The fact that a handful of industy giant are still doing production in Europe while moving at a glacial pace is not that relevant when China is rapidly out-innovating the West. If it continues like this, they will eventually die too.
Funfact: If you are working in the industry, you know that there are many companies who produce electronics in Europe in general and some even in Germany.
Bosch, Continental, Siemens, Palfinger, FAUN, Webasto, Phoenix Contact, Beckhoff, …
I'd add Infineon to that list, formerly Siemens.
As far as I am aware the European plants survive mostly on decent QA and regulated industries. When the cost of a defect slipping QA is high, it can be cheaper to operate European plant with intra-step quality controls than manufacture in China and slap thorough QA on top.
Hitachi Energy as well, afaik anyway.
The problem is the gap between hobbyist project and hundred-thousand-unit production run.
You can't easily and cheaply get 10, 100, or 1000 units manufactured in the EU the way you can in China. This pretty much kills hardware startups and scaleups wanting to do local manufacturing.
If you're not a multinational or have an essentially-unlimited budget for your small-scale run, you have to outsource it to China.
I work with companies, which have a more like small scale production. They are about 100 or so workers. Yes, this is also possible. They grew their business in the last 25 years, when it was even harder to produce something than these days. At least one of these business have PCB suppliers in the EU, which helped them in the post COVID crises where everybody struggled with supply.
I just named some big name brands. I also know mid-size and smaller brands.
Building your business and getting your stuff together is hard for any startup in any business field.
Could you perhaps share those PCBA businesses with us?
I tried quite hard to find them when I was still in the hardware world, and I never managed to find anything even remotely close to what China offers at less than 10x the price.
I'd love to give it another shot for some hobby projects if the industry has indeed changed in the last few years!
I can't share the name. I don't know their prices. I know that they are in Eastern Europe.
From my knowledge, the last time (2022ish) we talked about that was, that they don't take new customers for now. They are working at capacity.
I can second that there are relatively small electronics manufacturers in Germany. I know a few myself, although I'm not working in that field.
You sound like you're stuck in a rut. I don't see any of this.
Not sure why your post was buried. As the EU does have a lot of rules, but if a product is reasonably made its almost the same cost as the US market entry. Robert Feranec covers a lot of the more obscure EU rules:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTPb7etzOmA
Designs that contain China parts are often immediately disqualified from most trade exemptions. The landed cost can bump gadget retail prices too high in some countries. YMMV =3
Really? Most of the electronics I work on get made in the EU. There are a few decent options, even. It's not dead, even if China is much bigger.
i was looking it up and the 12th biggest pcb manufacture is in austria. which is europa afaik. Its not that dead
"In Leoben befindet sich das weltweite Headquarter von AT&S. Derzeit gibt es drei Produktionslinien, die eine Reihe von verschiedenen ML/HDI Highend-Leiterplatten, Embedded Lösungen für Power Applikationen vor allem im Server Bereich und Cores für die IC-Substratwerke herstellen. Weiteres werden spezielle Technologien für Aviation & Satellites, Industrie, Automotive und den IC-Markt entwickelt und gefertigt.
Mitarbeiter: 1.759 Eröffnung: 1982 Fokus: Automotive, Aviation, Industrial, Medical, Communication, Consumer, Computer, Semicon Ein neues Werk, das derzeit gebaut wird, wird auch die Produktion von IC-Substraten nach Leoben bringen, einschließlich bedeutsamer Kapazitäten für Forschung und Entwicklung. Mit dem neuen Werk werden rund 700 neue Arbeitsplätze geschaffen, wodurch sich die Zahl der Mitarbeiter:innen nahezu verdoppeln wird.
Fabriksgasse 13, 8700 Leoben, Österreich"
https://ats.net/
Reminds me that comma.ai has its own line. While their setup is quite expensive they do run production for a smartphone-level of difficulty in-house. They detail it incredibly well at commacon [0].
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iiBSN224w4
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE-QlIWMHxM
What I really would love is a JLCPCB equivalent in Europe. Slightly higher prices are OK, but I want to have the the Same amount of process automation and flexibility. Should be good for a scale of a few thousend per year.
Eurocircuits does the same kind of service (bar the parts library) but has the DRC - but you aren't going to get slightly higher from anyone in Europe
Hi! Have you every checked out aisler.net? In my opinion they do an amazing job, it's not quite JLCPCB prices, but maybe only 20% higher depending on what service you take, and they deliver faster since they are based in europe.
Their business model is pooling small orders and sending them to board fabs in europe, mainly germany and some in the east.
Aisler is decent for bare boards, but their PCBA is several orders of magnitude more expensive due to the setup & handling fees. JLCPCB has this down to a science, with their preloaded (and therefore dirt-cheap) "basic parts" and pre-approved "extended parts" pulled directly from LCSC for a small fee.
On top of that they also offer 3D printing, CNC machining, sheet metal bending, and even a McMaster-Carr-like parts store. It is literally a one-stop-shop for all your hardware prototype needs.
> maybe only 20% higher depending on what service you take
For higher-end board that seems likely. For cheap hobby-grade boards just the job fee[1] is more than 10 boards delivered is from JLCPCB.
That said, thanks for reminding me. Will definitely compare next time I need boards.
[1]: https://community.aisler.net/t/our-simple-pricing/102#p-124-...
Have you looked at Eurocircuits? Not quite as big, but similar kind of thing.
Similar in how you order, not similar in price at all. Order of magnitude more expensive for hobby-grade boards.
CCC is some kind of anti commercialist / leftist propaganda organization nowadays.