Two stages, one finished board. Learn what each step does, decide who should build yours, and price it in seconds.
The phrase bundles two distinct manufacturing stages that are often bought together. Understanding where one ends and the other begins is the difference between a clean quote and a surprise invoice.
Fabrication turns your copper layout into a physical laminate. Sheets of fiberglass and copper are bonded, imaged, etched, drilled, plated, coated with solder mask, and finished with a silkscreen. The output is an empty printed circuit board — every trace and pad in place, but no components yet.
Key fabrication variables are layer count, board thickness, copper weight, minimum trace/space, and the surface finish that protects exposed copper (HASL, OSP, or ENIG).
Assembly mounts and solders components onto the bare board to create a working circuit. Surface-mount parts are placed by pick-and-place machines and fixed in a reflow oven; through-hole parts are wave- or hand-soldered. The result is a functional assembly, ready for test.
If you already have a fabricator you trust, you can also source PCB assembly on its own from an assembly-focused shop and simply ship your bare boards in to be populated.
.gbr .drl
Layer-by-layer copper, mask and silkscreen artwork plus the NC drill map. This drives fabrication. ODB++ or IPC-2581 work too.
BOM.csv
Every component with reference designator, value, footprint and a manufacturer part number so parts can be sourced or checked.
CPL / XY
Centroid data giving each part's X/Y position, rotation and side. This tells the placement machine exactly where every component lands.
A real sequence, in order. Signal flows from your design files all the way to a boxed, tested board.
Export Gerbers, BOM and CPL. A design-for-manufacture review flags risky footprints early.
Laminate, image, etch, drill, plate, mask and finish the bare board.
Solder-paste stencil, pick-and-place, reflow, then through-hole and hand work.
AOI and X-ray catch defects; functional test confirms the board works.
Boards are cleaned, panelized or depanelized, packed and shipped.
Price is the easiest number to compare and the worst one to decide on alone. These are the criteria that separate a manufacturer that saves your schedule from one that quietly wrecks it.
High-density boards raise the stakes on the assembly side in particular. A part like a modern FPGA can arrive in a fine-pitch BGA with hundreds or thousands of balls, and those hidden joints only inspect well with X-ray and a well-controlled reflow profile — so a shop's process discipline matters as much as its price list.
| Criterion | Weight | Vendor A | Vendor B |
|---|
Enter your board and the readout updates live. Prototype pricing is dominated by one-time setup and stencil fees; at volume the per-board number drops fast. This is an educational estimate — a firm quote always needs your Gerbers and BOM.
All values are approximate. Component (part) cost is quoted separately from your BOM.
Once the research is done and you're ready to build, a full-service pcb fabrication and assembly partner such as PCBSync runs the bare-board fabrication and the component build under one roof — so a single team is accountable for the board that lands on your bench.
