We have seen this situation a number of times: An American or European company designs a new product They find a manufacturing partner that has some general experience in their industry (but has never made that precise product, since it is totally new) Since the buyer needs flexibility and service, and can't afford high prices, they tend to work with a small or medium sized factory (fewer than 500 employees, and often fewer than 200) All the development (NPI) work gets done, but … [Read more...]

By Fabien Gaussorgues Are you going to manufacture a mechanical and/or electrical product in China? This article will help you plan for the steps for follow. You might need a concept of the product, to show investors and to launch a Kickstarter campaign. You might need a prototype that is close to the final version of the product, in order to run testing (including usability testing) and validate the design before going into production. The usual process goes as follows. (The steps … [Read more...]

A client asked me, how to decide on tolerances to write on a drawing, when giving a technical file to a Chinese manufacturer? I always suggest to importers that they define a product specification sheet. And they often struggle with setting the right tolerances. Many considerations need to be taken into account. This is not a formal how-to guide, but I jotted down a few ideas. First, you might not need to specify every dimension on your product. And on those dimensions you end up … [Read more...]

The number of new products to be launched on Kickstarter or Indiegogo has grown very fast. It seems not a week passes without a start-up team contacting us for either developing a new product or for help on their production in China. Some projects are very successful and raise important amounts of funding on these platforms. Most projects raise more modest funds and don’t receive much publicity. However, some are worth studying. Not just because their products can be pretty innovative, but … [Read more...]

This is the last article in our series about what it takes to develop a complex electronic product in China. We'll look at ways to save on the costs of electronic components, and how to make assembly easier. Ideally, your Chinese contract manufacturer would help you on this topic. Especially with making assembly easier, since it translates into fewer quality issues and delays. In reality, it is up to the buyer & designer to come up with these types of improvements. 1. Cost Saving … [Read more...]

This is the next article in our series that aims at giving readers an idea of what it takes to develop a complex electronic product in China. So you have prototypes. Before you start to work toward mass production, you probably want to refine the design. It usually takes one of the following two forms: Optimizing the material selection Miniaturizing some elements (This is not exhaustive. Many other aspects can be optimized -- for example power consuption, performance of the product, … [Read more...]

This is the fifth article in our series about what it takes to develop an electronic product in China. Let's look at the prototyping stage. The imaginary example we thought of, the Drone Intruder Interception System, is a complex design. It would require many different prototype models which would require different prototyping methods. For each element, there needs to be functional prototypes that not only work and function on their own but also as a system. This allows for individual … [Read more...]

After the design of the PCBA schematics comes the time to choose a chip set and to start working on the firmware. (If you are not inclined to read technical how-to articles, this will be quite boring to you... But we are trying to give a complete picture of what it takes to develop an electronic product.) Let's look at these 2 steps one by one. 1. Chip set selection A microprocessor uses microelectronic fabrication techniques to shrink the Central Processing Unit (CPU) to a very small … [Read more...]

The board schematics and the choice of chip set are an important step when developing an electronic product. Let's look into this, in this third article in our series (part 1 is here, part 2 is here) In a complex product system like we are discussing with the drone intruder interceptor, there will be multiple printed circuit board assemblies (PCBA), each having a specific function within the system. Some of these PCBAs will be size sensitive, which may require dedicated miniature or micro … [Read more...]