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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dan3 who wrote (85685)	1/7/2000 1:36:00 AM
From: Bill Jackson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572172

Dan3, Re: Prototypes from gerbers etc. If it is a fully laid out board you can get protoypes from specialty shops in as little as 24 hours, even for complex boards.....pay enough and they dance fast. Of course you then need to stuff it and plant all the parts, including the chipset and see it it runs. If it does not run it has to be debugged and that can take a while as you need to determine if it is an error in the production of the board or in the layout or the original files. make several and if they all have the same problem that narrows it. Do this again and again until it works 100%. With all parts in stock and a perfect prototype it is quite possible to do all this over a weekend. Might cost you $10,000 for the 6 layer prototype bare PCBs. Ask for 1 week turnaround and that can drop to $3-4000(assuming a board the size of an athlon/P-III mobo. If the file is just a circuit schematic that needs to be laid out and it is amenable to an autorouter, add a day or less. If you want a tight board(smaller size) it may take longer and involve more human input. If you notice the first protoype boards are usually larger than the final iteration as with more space the human/autoroute time drops dramatically. People can lay out boards better than autorouters if the board is tight and crowded as well as high frequency. Without chipsets they will not make the prototypes as there may be last minute circuit changes, and so no final wirenet diagram. A precise cost would need a schematic and placement diagram and hole count, what I have said it a ballpark estimate. Bill