Hi Earl,

I also had a very bad experience with Sanmina a while back.  Perhaps I
shouldn't tell this story in public or in this forum, but what goes around
comes around.  It involved several Sanmina facilities.  The project was a 2"
x 4" rigid microvia board with components both sides and BGA's on one side
only.  The prototype board was to be fabricated at a Hadco Tech Center and
assembled at a Sanmina assembly shop.  At the time, this was a pretty big
technological leap for my client, so I did a lot of talking with various
Sanmina groups before we went this route, including their own captive design
group.  Everything sounded well within their capabilities and I got
reassuring answers all around and a written design guide for the microvia
process.

When we went to execute it, it seemed like I was working with a different
company.  The Hadco Tech Center folks were superb, but that was where
anything reasonable stopped. The program manager at the Sanmina assembly
plant, who disagreed with my recommendation to use HDI technology, even
their own, told my client that the boards were poorly designed and couldn't
be produced.  The Hadco Tech Center folks said that they considered the
board well within their design guidelines and saw no problems.  Once the
boards were fabricated, we found out that the Sanmina assembly shop had not
even started to order parts.  The assemblies were delivered weeks late and
only about one third of them functioned.  It appeared to be mostly open BGA
joints, but we didn't have time or resources to track it down to root
causes.  We later manually replaced most of the BGA's (0.8mm pitch) and were
able to recover many of the non-functional boards.

I worked relentlessly to get a production quote for the bare board without
any success.  Because of this, I went around the normal sales channels and
contacted people at several Sanmina fabrication plants hoping that someone
would respond positively.  Finally, a sales person from outside my
geographic area took pity on us and verbally quoted the board:  the price
was reasonable, but the 50,000 piece order could not begin to ship for 6
months.  I couldn't believe my ears.  They were no-bidding a half a million
dollar fab job that was within their capability.

Then things got ugly.  The regional Sanmina sales manager called my client
and complained that I had been "disruptive" in dealing with their
organization.  Apparently, that meant complaining up the chain of command
when sales people did not return calls and were unable to come up with a
production quote despite repeatedly promising to do so.  At the same time,
the Sanmina assembly program manager insisted that all further communication
with their company go through my client's purchasing manager rather than
myself.  He also suggested that Sanmina take over the design task to "insure
everything worked".  In short, they tried to get me fired for taking them to
task on their representations.  The amusing part is that I was the one that
recommended Hadco as the fab shop in the first place.

Fortunately, the engineering manager at my client stuck up for me, which was
a courageous thing for him to do.  Most people would not have done this when
facing an organization like Sanmina.  In the end, the client hired me to
redesign the circuit and PCB to use conventional board technology at a
non-Hadco shop, the purchasing manager got fed up and left and Sanmina lost
the assembly contract.

I really felt sorry for the Hadco Tech Center folks, who were top-notch in
every respect.  Their excellent work, and my client's time and money, were
wasted by their parent company's conduct.

Regards,

Seth Goodman
Goodman Associates, LLC
tel 608.833.9933
fax 608.833.9966

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