PCB Assembly For The Medical Device And Military Electronics Fields
While the demand for medical devices and military electronics is not as sizeable as consumer electronics, for the most part OEMs in these fields still perceive advantages in outsourcing the PCB assembly. Each market has its own needs, and companies that supply PCB assemblies for this group of applications have got to adhere to these needs when they desire to participate. Because of industry specifications and required certifications many PCB assembly houses exist that focus on supporting military electronic and the medical device market. Generally they are not the global EMS players that you might have heard of, but smaller regional players.
The advantages of outsourcing the assembly operation for military electronics and medical devices are comparable to those of consumer electronics. Frequently component package requirements are changing more rapidly than it is reasonable for product designers to keep up with. Their focus has to remain on meeting the customer’s requirments with new products, and they can rely on process engineers at their contract manufacturer be knowldegable of the most up-to-date technologies in component packages and the details of the assembly process. Additionally the overhead associated with maintaining an assembly operation operating can poorly influence a company’s bottom line-especially when their products are low volume, and high mix which could result in lots of idle time for their in-house assembly operation.
For military electronics, the majority of OEMs demand that their PCB assembly houses are ITAR certified. ITAR means International Traffic in Arms Regulations, and it is a set of regulations that control the import and export of defense-related equipment. ITAR was enacted during the Cold War, and it was implemented to avoid the transfer of technology to the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc nations. With the war on terror presently going on, ITAR regulations have been used to avoid the retransfer of equipment to third party countries. For example, ITAR’s regulations prevented the re-sale of US made F-16′s involving Venezuela and Iran.
For medical devices, the most important matter is quality control. This is for obvious reasons since the untimely failure of a medical device would have life-threatening results. Despite these concerns, there is still lots of pressure from OEMs on their assembly partners to reduce cost-while not impacting quality. Even with these challenging demands from OEMs, the medical device assembly market is very appealing. According to GIA the international marketplace for medical device outsourcing is predicted to be US$ 42.6 billion by 2015.
Even though production runs are usually made up of high mix, low volume builds supporting the medical device or military electronics business can be very attractive for many regional contract manufacturers. Like companies in other industries medical device and military electronics suppliers are looking for ways to wring cost out of their products, and outsourcing the assembly is an attractive solution. The ability to scale up or scale down production on demand makes good fiscal sense and allows OEMs in these industries to convert the fixed costs of production into an entirely variable cost model. Being able to respond quickly to the variations in demand from their customers is critical, but the overall growth of the medical device and military electronics industry makes it attractive for many regional assembly houses to support them.
Circuitrep supports the assembly demands of the military electronics industry, through our partner ACD who can support all of your low to mid volume PCB Assembly needs.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
