Custom Tailored or Off the Rack?

Much like a bespoke suit, PCBs require individual tailoring to meet a customer’s needs.

A printed circuit board is not a commodity and many in the electronics supply chain do not understand that. Buyers wanting “champagne at beer prices” leads them to press fabricators to devalue their efforts and work. Additionally, I have spoken with designers who have no idea how boards are made, but then turn around and speak with an air of authority that the fabricator should just “dial in the fabrication process” to etch a narrower trace on their board.

I am not sure what most buyers and designers have in mind of how printed circuit boards are manufactured, but a good analogy helps many to understand that boards are custom tailored, like a fine bespoke suit, and not a garment off the rack.

Now I realize a bespoke suit may be an analogy many wouldn’t understand without a bit of context. Bespoke means made specifically for one customer. To be sure, in the modern era of business casual and even casual attire in certain work environments, suits are a lot less common.

Suits can be acquired from many different establishments these days: thrift stores, men’s specialty stores, department stores, even online retailers! Depending on the type of establishment, services are generally commensurate with pricing. At a thrift store, given its nature, you are likely looking at a secondhand garment, one already customized for a different body. Not something that really fits with the analogy of PCB sourcing, but it would be very interesting to be able to reuse old PCBs in such a way.

At a department or men’s specialty store, you are likely to encounter the most common type of suit, one commonly called “off the rack,” as these are all premade. And by far, this is the most common type of suit seen today. Components, such as the slacks and jacket, hang on the rack, hence the name, and are generally sorted by shoulder size for the jacket and waist size for the pants. The suits can have various modifications to further customize them – usually small modifications to improve the fit. Generally these customizations come in the form of a simple hemming of the pants and adjusting of sleeve length, but they sometimes get more involved in further after-manufactured tailoring. The process for purchasing the suit involves a quick measurement of the shoulders and waist to determine the jacket and pants to try on. Once a selection is made, then customization measurements are made for the tailor to adjust the premade garment. Thus provides the name of these types of suits as “off the rack” as they are made before the customer even arrives.

The process for a bespoke suit and some made-to-pattern suits is one where measurements of one’s body are taken by the tailor, and the fabric and style are chosen all the way down to the buttons. Then the cloth is cut from a roll and either sewn to a modified pattern or to a specific pattern based on the measurements. The significant difference here is everything is customizable, and nothing is precut or sewn until after measurements and selections are made. Each bespoke suit is tailored from the start to specifically fit your body. After it is sewn, there might be another fitting or two to correct any small issues or make last minute changes, but this is a suit designed from conception to fit you. Just as a printed circuit board is custom made for each revision, so too is a bespoke suit.

To give context, rough prices for these suits range from a thrift store suit costing $50-$100 and a department store suit around $200-$500. A bespoke suit may cost in the range of >$2000. This is because the process of making the bespoke suit values the artistry and customization of the tailor. More time, energy, and customization are involved, with direct communication with the customer needed to make a suit based entirely on what they want. An off-the-rack suit is modified after the fact and is sewn in a factory months or years before the customer walks in for a fitting.

Many in the PCB industry, especially buyers, try to commoditize the bespoke nature of the printed circuit boards. If the boards are commodities, then they have less value, and the price can be driven down. A commodity, after all, is a product that is identical regardless of who produces it, but there are significant differences in quality and performance between different factories. One is likely to see differences in boards between two lines in the same PCB factory!

The same schematic handed to 10 different designers, who each in turn have the designs fabricated at 10 fabricators, will result in 100 different boards. One might think that the boards become a commodity when broaching into high-volume manufacturing, but building a significant number of boards doesn’t change the fact that they are still only for one customer. The PCBs aren’t going to several different customers to make different products, but to that one customer. The idea that printed circuit boards are a commodity does a disservice to designers and fabricators.

Perhaps one day we will achieve design building blocks that we can pull and connect for pre-designed sections of printed circuit boards, but given their unique nature and the ever-evolving needs of designers, I doubt that will be in the near future.

Components like resistors and capacitors may be interchangeable commodities,  but the printed circuit board is the last thing completed in the design and the first thing needed by the assembler to start placing components. I suspect some in our industry don’t value the skill and craftsmanship necessary for high-quality front-end engineering and the factory skills that exist among PCB fabricators today. So the next time someone asks you about the PCB industry, you can tell them it is like ordering a bespoke suit.