So I Want to Manufacture in China... Who Should I Use?

A friend recently asked me on behalf of a client if I had any recommendations about finding a contract manufacturer (CM) in China. Here's the lightly edited version of what I wrote back to her:

This is (as you know) a massively involved question.  It depends enormously on the nature of the product...  Volumes?  BOM cost?  Level of Tech?  The CM you'd use to make 10,000,000 greeting card modules on paper one-layer boards is very different than you'd want to make 1,000 pieces of a 19" x 19" 20-layer HDI PCB with $20,000 worth of parts on it.  In between is an entire spectrum of possibilities. China is also so entirely about relationships that you REALLY need to have an introduction and preferably some prior contact with anyone you want to work with.  You should also plan to have boots on the ground there often or even continuously, especially early in the process.  Ideally that representative is someone Chinese who speaks the language and knows the culture, and has relevant relationships already in place.  Although you then also need to be careful that those pre-existing relationships don't mean that "your" guy is more loyal to your vendor than to you.  A good place to start that I just heard about last week from a co-worker of mine, and which sounds interesting is Dragon Innovation.  I should emphasize that I have not used them myself, but I've heard good things about them...

Another question I would ask is "Are they sure that they want / need to manufacture in China?"  The benefits of building there are shrinking, especially at the lower end of the volume scale.  I have found more and more CMs in the U.S. that are willing to take on medium volume manufacturing at lower cost if you can give them lead time.  They use those jobs to fill in gaps in their "primary" quick-turn prototype assembly.  One place here in the Seattle area that I use for protos but which also does smaller end production work is Out of the Box Manufacturing.  I use them to assemble boards, but they can also do full final product assembly and test.  You can also "split the difference," and do the more commodity aspects of your manufacturing (e.g. bare PCB fab, or PCB fab + assembly, or shooting plastics) overseas, and then do final assembly, calibration, and test here in the U.S. You can also look into working with U.S. firms that have subsidiaries or partners in Mexico or elsewhere in Latin America.

A local design-and-project management firm that we use for a lot of stuff, and with whom I've had good luck, is Monsoon Solutions. They have relationships with fab houses and assembly houses in the US as well as internationally, and can help you find the right balance of cost, speed, and international entanglement.  They will also maintain inventories of part kits and help actually design products as well, if you want.  Of course, you pay for their expertise, but I've found it to be valuable.  Obviously I've got a current bias for Seattle sources.  Many of my Bay Area leads for this stuff are somewhat stale, since over the last few years my employers have either had direct relations with industry-specific ODM firms in China (hence my frequent travel!) or didn't manufacture in China at all...  There's also a fairly recent profusion of manufacturing consultants on all this stuff, arguably making it much easier to get started in HW production.

Anyway, this only touches on some of the myriad issues.  It doesn't even mention issues of Chinese vs. U.S. law , intellectual property protection, supply chain integrity, international shipping, and so on. As usual, the correct answer is "get expert help with this, because it's a monumental undertaking, and it's worth getting right."  Good Luck!

China Travelogue - The Great Firewall of China

As my cousin Stacy pointed out last week, I have missed my deadline.  I had set the goal of posting at least once a week here for the next year, and then only a few weeks in I missed that goal.  The cause of my shortcoming is a combination of Chinese totalitarianism and my shortsightedness.

I’ve just spent two weeks in China on a business trip.  Although I was aware of “The Great Firewall of China,” this is the first trip where it has completely thwarted my efforts.  “The Great Firewall” is the wholesale, systematic censorship of Internet access within the People’s Republic of China.  From inside China, it appears that a large number of common websites just don’t work.  Attempts to connect to them result in a “connection reset” message, or sometimes the connection simply times out with no response at all.  One of the sites so blocked is blogger.com, where I write this blog.

Reset connection to blogger.com

Timed-out connection to Facebook

There are some ways around The Great Firewall.  Virtual Private Networks or “VPNs” can be used to create an encrypted tunnel between a computer inside the PRC and a portal on the outside, through which (virtually) all network traffic can be passed.  From the user’s point of view, it is like browsing from the far end of the VPN.  There are a few problems with this solution.  The first is speed and bandwidth.  If I have a VPN connection to my home, and I request data from a website, that data has to both go into my home machine, which is limited by my home download speed, and then be sent to me out of  my home over the VPN, which is limited by my home upload speed.  There is also some delay introduced for the VPN server at my home to encrypt the data for transfer over the VPN.  All the traffic passing through the VPN has to traverse the network connection to the VPN server twice.  This can, of course, be overcome by using a fast machine with a really high bandwidth Internet connection, but it still represents a bottleneck.

There are also some more technical VPN issues.  If I’m connected to the Internet at my hotel in China, I need to make sure that the packets required to maintain that local connection to the hotel’s network aren’t shipped out over the VPN.  For example, DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) is used to get an IP address in most public networks.  It is also used to renew that address when it expires.  If that traffic isn’t left on the local network, then the Internet connection required for the VPN can’t be set up in the first place.

Another work-around is web proxies.  These are similar to VPNs, in that you send your request for a web-page to a server somewhere else, that that server, acting as your “proxy,” requests the web page and forwards it on to you.  That way, the routers filtering traffic from certain sites don’t know where your traffic is originating and let it through unmolested.  There are many free web proxies, but most of them don’t work terribly well, although it wasn’t clear to me if they are simply overloaded, or if China is doing a really good job of blocking them as quickly as the pop up.

To access some static web content you can use a search engine as your proxy.  Microsoft’s “Bing” works pretty well in China, and in several cases I was able to search for some content I wanted to see, and even though those pages were blocked, I could download the cached data from Bing.  This only works for web content that is relatively static, and non-interactive.  And while I could access the Bing cached pages, the Google cache did not seem to work.

It turns out that there is also a way to set up blogger to post anything mailed to a pre-arranged e-mail address.  Since I didn’t set that up ahead of time (my aforementioned shortsightedness), I couldn’t use that on this trip.

So why does China go to the expense and effort of maintaining The Great Firewall?  I think the pretense is to block “objectionable content” from the people of the People’s Republic.  It seems obvious to me that it is an effort to manage the flow of information and control the mindset and mood of the populous.  Above and beyond that, though, there also seems to be some element of supporting SOE’s (State Owned Enterprises) over their foreign competitors.  Although China apparently has a booming social networking industry, Facebook is blocked.  I would love to see the World Trade Organization, which China was so hot to join ten years ago, take a look at this aspect of it.


On future trips, I’ll know to set up more infrastructure in advance.  But for now I’m just happy to be back on the right side of the Great Firewall.

Bad Hardware UI Design

I am cheap. I admit this by way of explanation for why I often buy the lowest cost functional equivalent for many of the things I use. In electronics, this means that I will purchase the no-name brand if it offers the same functionality as the branded version. Looking at Gigabit Ethernet PCI NICs recently, I realized that they were ALL using the exact same Realtek chip. Thus it made no difference which one I purchased, they were all basically the same component on a PCB implementing the chip maker's reference design, with price as the only differentiator. You could possibly argue that there are differences in quality of PCB fabrication or assembly, but they are all made in China, and there's a pretty good chance that multiple brands came off the same assembly lines, or at least lines at the same manufacturer. They have all been cost reduced to the bleeding edge of functionality, so to my thinking they are all basically the same.

The differences that do pop up between the name brand products and the no-name versions are in the little design details. It struck me twice this weekend when I ran across amusing examples of bad hardware user interface design. The first was this USB drive housing for ATA hard drives:


Notice that they have helpfully labeled the LED as "LED." What does the LED indicate? I have no idea. To find out, I would have to read the documentation. And I'll bet that it was not written or edited by a native English speaker. I'm okay with this, because I bought the $19 box instead of the $29 box, and I'd rather have the $10 than a well-labeled LED since I'm generally not looking at it anyway. Still, I find it kind of sad that it was important enough to cast the text under the LED into the metal of the housing, but not important enough to actually convey any information with it.

Likewise, this consumer widget helpfully indicates the specific color of the LEDs:


Now, you might glean some additional information from the adjacent position labels on the switch, inferring that green means it is cooling and red means it is warming. Although it could also be that green means it is working, and red means it is not. Or green means that it is at temperature, and red means it is in the process of changing temperature. I just don't know. In any case, perhaps this is the last market differentiator available at the low end. If I had a choice between the cheap item with a random, useless UI design, and one in which someone had put several hours of thought into how to make it slightly more usable, I'd probably buy the slightly more usable one. Although only if it doesn't cost any more...