Minimize Board Assembly Cost

[The_Todd]

I've finished the schematic of my first board for my student senior project and am planning on having about 10 printed / assembled. I'm planning on having all the SMT components such as resistors, capacitors, inductors and tqfp / qfn assembled by 3rd party, and doing through hole connectors such as DB9 / PWR myself. I've finished the schematic which contains:
Microchip PIC
CAN controller
Zigbee Chip
TCP/IP
I2C
RS232 and more...

My Question Is: How do I reduce the cost of assembly?
Is one size SMT like 0402, 0604, 0805 cheaper than the other?
How much cheaper would it be to just mount the resistors / caps / inductors and do the rest myself?
Does putting SMT devices on both sides of board increase a lot of cost?
Can TQPF80 and QFN40, SO16, SSOP, SOT-23 be assembled by machines like resistors - Are these relatively expensive?

Also - does anybody have any idea of relative (ball park) cost to print / assemble 10 boards 100mm x 80mm with:
40 smt capacitors - 8 types
20 smt resistors - 6types
5 smt inductors - 3 types
1 tqfp80
1 qfn40
2 sot223
1 sot23-5
1 so-16
1 s0-8
1 s0-18

Thanks so much - I really have no clue.

Todd

 

[Iouri]

How do I reduce the cost of assembly?

Contact local contract house

Is one size SMT like 0402, 0604, 0805 cheaper than the other?

might be not because if you go to 0402 your yeld rate can be higher

How much cheaper would it be to just mount the resistors / caps / inductors and do the rest myself?

Free

Does putting SMT devices on both sides of board increase a lot of cost?

reduce because board will go through the machine only ones, and you need only one stencill

 

[The_Todd]

Thanks Iouri for your help.

Could you clarify a couple things.

Are you saying that SMT devices on both sides is cheaper than one side?

What is yield rate?

Thanks!
Todd[/quote]

 

[andre_luis]

0805 and 1206 is relativelly easy to solder it youself.
0402 and 0604 is to much hard to do it without pick-and-place machine.

My sugestion is to use size standards that allow assemble PCI manually or automaticlly.

At larger scale of production, you could reduce number of vias due some PCI manufacturers calculate busy time required to drill machine.

+++

 

[PaulHolland]

Lower the number of components in your design and use cheaper components if possible. Make the PCB as small as possible and only use SMD on ONE side !. This is much cheaper compared with two sides. Remove any component that needs to be placed by hand, like hole-through components and use a SMD or SMT version even if more expensive.

So best is fewer components to do the same job

That is about it.

 

[Iouri]

also try to minimize componets scew let's say you have 10K 3.3K 5.6K pull ups replace them with same value or even resistor network

 

[The_Todd]

Thanks you guys! All this is very helpful.

Todd