Jack,

Actually, I was busy pounding keys and didn't even see your response - was just throwing out some ideas here.

.....

It's quite common that products get moved around to different fabricators and manufacturers during their lifecycle, normally the end result of a bean counting exercise. The individuals who make the decisions to move products to save a few fractions of a percent are somehow convinced that they are dealing with commodity items ... until the exercise blows up, then (and usually only then) is the designer's expertise again enlisted to try to clean up the mess.

For fabrication, there are a few common panel sizes that every fabricator routinely processes; keeping manufacturing panels in sub-multiples of these numbers should ensure good yield from most fabrication shops.

Manufacturing requirements do tend to vary more. But investing time into identifying key parameters (depanel clearances, component to board edge clearances, tooling hole and fiducial features, thru to smt component clearnaces, etc.) and incorporating into your designs can make them nearly vendor independent.

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