| Most of the comments strongly advise against moving to Shenzhen. Having prototyped in both places I’ll make some arguments for. I’ll preface it’s only worth it if you’re beyond the limits of what American facilities can do and it's a step function in workflow and getting setup. There is an acceptable cultural tunnel vision in our field that developed in the 1980s for "how to do things" and hasn't changed much beyond "4 layer pcb on FR4 with surface mount components" - going against that grain requires an interdisciplinary mindset - as in "make a functioning circuit on a piece of toast" level of creativity[1]. If you’re building wearable tech there’s a strong chance you’ll need to make flex pcbs sooner or later. Those are comically cheap in China and stupid expensive stateside. Especially when you start pushing the boundaries - there’s so much low hanging fruit for experimenting with your PCBs when you’re in the factory making them. Most US manufacturers will only let you use one color for a solder mask. In Shenzhen we pioneered using full RGB to print any graphic on your pcb back in 2017. Even on top of the chips themselves. It’s now pretty easy to source. This is literally just by being on the factory floor and saying “hey can you do step 5 before you do step 4? - we want to take the boards to this other factory across town first” And they say “sure”. Likewise if you want to mount your parts sideways or upside down to save space. Or say, take a literal sea shell through a copper PVD machine and mill away some traces and mount some chips. They do not care and will gladly take your money and make it happen. One time we couldn’t find a single vendor in the US or Europe who would embed chips in the middle of pcb layers[2]. This was a weekend project for one of our Chinese vendors - who also had never done this but it sounded like fun so she said “no problem”. Can get turnaround on prototype boards with assembly for free once you have a cm or just $50 if you don’t. One American vendor comically insisted one couldn’t mix flex and rigid boards for one of our designs for less than $10k. In China it cost me $80. Likewise we mounted chips to non-traditional media like credit cards with no sweat. Any chip we wanted was available through HQB or TaoBao when Digikey was still backed up on Covid. Test fixtures (the laser cut jigs that you program and test pcbs) are $100. Stateside they were half as useful and $2000. You’re one blue Buick minivan ride from Guanzhou where all the garments in the world are made. Being at the intersection of these two cities is a strategic advantage. Cost of living is cheap. It will make you a better engineer by exposing you to the dirty business of manufacturing first hand. I'll go so bombastically hyperbolic and say not moving to Shenzhen as an EE is like not moving to Nashville as an aspiring country musician. In China the saying goes “anything is possible, nothing is easy.” I’d mostly agree with this but also point out that price is completely-orthogonal-to-possible in China, absolutely not in the US, and straight up forbidden in Germany. [1] https://talk.dallasmakerspace.org/t/breadboard-electronics/1... [2] https://twitter.com/pmg/status/1248148053795540992/photo/1 p.s. If you enjoyed this comment, you may also enjoy my "So you want to start a factory?" reply on a post from a few days ago [3] [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40001222 |
OSH Park does flex:
https://docs.oshpark.com/services/flex/