AUTOMATIC CALCULATION - PC, excel 2003 or earlier

AUTOMATIC CALCULATION - PC, excel 2007 or later

AUTOMATIC CALCULATION – MAC

Have you ever noticed that pcb pricing is all over the place!  Send out the same requirement to 5 fabricators and you will get back pricing that is so skewed from one to the next that you won't know how to make a decision.  Some will claim the technology is the driving force while others will point the finger at the short lead time or the small quantity…  Who are you to trust?

Well, I’m about to spill the beans and ruin it for all those companies trying to pull a quick one.  Like yourself, for the longest time I believed that if a pricing equation existed, it must be where the unicorns live.  But after a decade of being in this business, I finally derived a formula to find out what the average price per square inch should be on any particular requirement.  And now I'm going to share it with you!    If I disappear suddenly without notice, you’ll know why; I'm a marked women now.

To calculate price per square inch (PpSQ), get pricing from five or so suppliers that run in the same league.  Remember to be fair and do apples-to-apples comparisons: compare proto shops with other proto shops, high volume with high volume, offshore with offshore shops and so on.  Likewise, compare similar technologies: similar layer counts, microvia or HDI technologies, and performance requirements.  Then simply plug the information in the equation below:

 

PpSQ  =	Total Price - Tooling - Testing
	Qty x Square Inches

Example:
Qty: 10 pcs
Dimensions of a single board: 5” x 10” = 50 square inches
Tooling: 250.00
Test: 180.00
Total: 720.00
 

PpSQ =	720-180-250	= 0.58	$
	10 x 50		sq.inch

In our example we figured price / sq inch to be $0.58.  Repeat this with the other quotes and compare the PpSQs.  They should all be in the same ballpark. And if they are not?  Then you have identified the shop that is putting more in their pocket, paying more for labor, or running near capacity.  Also, be wary of the low bidder – anorexic profit margins, understaffed support departments and excess capacity are all signs of bad health.  I usually take the average PpSQ of all of the quotes and use that as a benchmark for fair pricing.  If a particular quote seems exceptionally high or low, I might not include it when I figure the average so that I don’t skew my own reference point.

Now we all know you geeks love to do math but let’s face it, true geeks are extremely busy individuals.  I’m sure you don’t have time to crunch simple numbers when you could be solving nonlinear differential equations or inventing a time machine – and I mean a real time machine, not just file backup software for Macs. So I’ve done all the prep work for you, putting the calculations into a spreadsheet that estimates the tooling and test charges and computes your PpSQ in a less than a nanosecond.  Just click your “automatic calculation” button at the top.