DEMO — fictional range. Local brief only, NOT SENT. No personal data is collected or transmitted.
BUYING
What a quotation needs in order to be a quotation.
Most board-connector enquiries stall because the buyer has a footprint and no signal. This is the list worth completing before the first message.
- Both halves
- Because the joint is the product, and the footprint is not the interface
- The signal
- Speed, and how many returns there are per signal
- The current
- Per contact, and how many carry it at once
- The cycles
- Because that decides the plating thickness
- The cable or board
- Because the pitch and the pin form follow from it
- The tooling
- Who owns the press setting, and how it is controlled
- The screening
- Whether the shell has to bond, and how that is measured
- The standard
- Which approval the joint has to meet, and who confirms it
Why both halves come first.
Because a footprint describes where the pins are and nothing about the connection. Specifying one half and sourcing the other elsewhere produces a pair that has never been tested together.
The most useful sentence in an enquiry.
"Twenty signals with four returns, mated about fifty times, and the shell has to bond." It tells the supplier the sequencing, the plating and the screening, and it is the sentence most enquiries leave out.
Why written beats verbal.
The expensive conversations are the ones about what was agreed. A brief that exists only in a meeting leaves every disputed detail open.