The Importance of DFM

Design for Manufacturing (DFM) is an important concept for PCB Fabrication and PCB Assembly projects of any scale. At production-level order quantities, small design changes can often save you considerable amounts of both time and money, and prototype orders always need to be produced as quickly and accurately as possible, so you can get started on testing. In order to help clients maximize the efficiency of their project, Bittele Electronics is dedicated to providing Free DFM Check services with every PCB order.

Considerations related to DFM depend upon your specific PCB service provider, so Bittele is happy to work with our clients from the design stage of a project through the production process. To aid in your design, Bittele provides a comprehensive DFM Guidelines document, and an accompanying DFA (Design for Assembly) Guidelines document. These documents include definitions and explanations for Bittele’s various tolerances, rules, capabilities, and testing procedures for PCB Fabrication and PCB Assembly. With this information in hand, you can always make sure that your design will be easily manufacturable at Bittele. Not only will you avoid potentially time-consuming clarifications during production, but you will be armed with all of the information you need to design specifically for a fast turn time or low production cost. Your account manager with Bittele can also help you with this process if you have any questions not answered by our guideline documents.

Once your PCB order is submitted for production, our team of quality assurance engineers will assess your design in detail, and provide you with a free DFM Check Report. This report will often contain questions or approval requests that must be addressed before production can begin, and often includes suggestions to improve manufacturability on any subsequent runs of this design. These checks help us to meet our high Quality Standards on every order, and to continuously improve our working relationships with our clients. We provide this service at no additional cost, and the time requirement is factored in to the lead time figure on your official PCB quotation.

Through our years of experience in PCB Fabrication and PCB Assembly services, we have found that DFM is an integral part of the PCB production process. Designers who neglect this aspect are much more likely to run into problems during production, which could potentially delay the process and end up introducing extra cost if changes are necessary. At Bittele, it is our goal to make sure our clients have all of the information they need to make informed decisions about their orders with us. We pledge to work with you every step of the way to ensure that your project will come out exactly right on the first try.

If you have any questions about Bittele’s capabilities, our DFM policies, or the viability of your project in particular, please feel free to Contact Us any time! You can send your questions, or your PCB Design Files, to sales@7pcb.com, or call us toll-free at 1-888-812-1949.