Contract Engineering, or Staff Augmentation?

Businesses have a choice to design their products using inside engineers, outside contractors, or a mix of both. For organizations without an engineering team, the reasons to hire a contract engineer may be obvious. But for companies with an on-site engineering team, what are the benefits to hiring an outside contract engineer?

Employee Overhead

Hiring a full time employee is expensive, and the expenses associated with one hire go well beyond the salary of that employee. Employee overhead includes paid time off, health insurance, dental and vision care, matched retirement contributions, and numerous other benefits.

A new hire will need an office desk and computer equipment. They will need to be trained on everything from how to file for time off to learning about document control. Someone will need to configure their laptop, provide them with email and network access, and access to the building too. Corporate policy might require a photo for an employee lanyard, or background checks to ensure adequate security clearance for the premises.

Only when those pieces are in place can the new employee actually begin their work. But the expenses don’t stop there. Businesses with employees also need to pay unemployment taxes for each employee, and workman’s compensation taxes too. If the company is enrolled in an outside payroll service, they will also want a slice of the pie.

Numerous online publications suggest that once all employee overhead is tallied, the total cost of an actual employee can be as high as 1.4 times that employee’s salary. And these costs don’t consider whether the new employee is a good fit among your team, and how the employee will contribute to (or take away from) company culture.

Staff Augmentation

“Staff augmentation can be a winning strategy for small or mid-sized companies, allowing them to maintain forward momentum without committing to new full-time hires.”

When it’s time to grow your organization, but you aren’t ready to bring on a full time hire, contract engineers can be a great way to fill the gap. Contract engineers cover their own expenses, making the primary expense to the employer the hourly rate for the engineer to carry out their work.

It’s 2020, and with team-centric platforms that support messaging and video conferencing (Slack and Zoom are two personal favorites), it’s easier than ever to bring on remote team members. (Rumor has it that Stack Overflow requires on-site employees to join meetings via video conference, creating a quiet and interruption-free work environment with a level playing field for all employees regardless of their location.)

In companies that already reap the benefits of a distribute team, “staff augmentation” is more likely to be in the corporate vernacular than “contract engineering” or “outsourcing”.

Staff augmentation can bee a winning strategy for small or mid-sized companies, allowing them to maintain forward momentum without committing to new full-time hires. Outside help allows companies to respond to short-term demands without worrying about whether there will be enough resources to keep new employees if work slows down in the future.

Valuable Insight

Companies who work solely with internal engineers can develop a culture where engineering anecdotes get passed from one employee to another, locking in out-of-date design strategies while forcibly ignoring new approaches and new components due to the folklore that surrounds them. While employee engineers may be loyal to specific design recipes and component manufacturers, contract engineers who have worked with numerous clients are more likely to have experience with a wider array of projects. They are more likely to approach a design with new angles in mind, and can bring valuable insight from their prior projects into the doors of a growing business.

Core Competencies

In the fast-paced world of start-ups, leaders are pressured to spend money, grow as quickly as possible, and generate value for investors. But what happens when a team of geologists, biologists, and statisticians suddenly need to design a circuit board?

Smaller companies tend to combat new challenges by giving their employees multiple hats, encouraging non-engineering employees to design circuits without a sufficient background in electronics design. This leaves valuable experts on the team underutilized, distracts daily operations away from core competencies, and stunts company growth. This strategy can lead to numerous product iterations before a desirable solution is achieved. Even then, bringing in a contract engineer might be necessary to push the design toward a reliable and production-ready solution.

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Whether your organization is lacking an in-house engineering team or your business is going through a sporadic period of growth, a contract engineer might be the perfect way to augment your team. Contact the Engineering Design Group today, and let’s transform your vision into reality.

Surface-Mount Component Packages - Which is best?

Surface-mount PCB components are available in multiple industry standardized packages. These packages are defined by the Institute for Interconnecting and Packaging Electronic Circuits, more widely known in the industry as IPC (and formerly known as the Institute of Printed Circuits).

Each standardized package has a unique footprint, or land pattern, and follows nomenclature that indicates an acronym for the family name followed by the number of pins on the device. For example, the surface-mount package “LQFP-44” indicates a Low-profile Quad Flat Package with 44 pins. Some more common IPC packages for ICs are SOT23-5, TSSOP-16, SOIC-8, and QFN-8. These are just a few examples. The list goes on and on, and continues to grow as new sizes and shapes of chip packaging are created to accommodate newer technologies.

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Once a team has completed the specification for a circuit board, the design cycle begins. The engineers are selecting new parts to achieve the required design functionality, and are fervently creating them for placement into the schematic and PCB. Inevitably, someone on the team will open a datasheet to create a new part and discover that the same part is available in not one, but several different IPC packages.

Consider this I2C bus voltage-level translator — Texas Instruments model PCA9306. This part is available in four different 8-pin packages: SSOP-8, VSSOP-8, X2SON-8, and DSBGA-8. Which part package is the best?

At first glance, the smallest package seems optimal, as the PCB is already cluttered with parts, and using a smaller part will leave some precious space on the PCB for routing traces. But a deeper look may reveal some other perspectives.

The best choice depends on how you perceive the trade-offs of each IPC package in the context of your organization. Viewing the possible outcomes through different lenses can offer valuable insight when selecting which package is best for the circuit board.

Here are some perspectives to consider:

• Engineering considerations

  • One package may already exist in the company’s component library. (Faster design results with reduced design risk)

  • If the design is only a prototype, can the engineer switch out the part in the lab, or will another batch of boards need to be assembled to test an alternate?

  • One package may offer better thermal qualities than another.

  • Does the height of the package impact your ability to apply a heatsink to another nearby component?

• Procurement considerations

  • Is the pin pitch so tight that the clearance between the copper of each pad exceeds the capabilities of your PCB manufacturer? A tighter pin pitch (and pad-to-pad clearance) may increase the cost and delivery time of your PCBs. (While that might be acceptable for prototypes, are you willing to accept the increase on larger production runs?)

  • Is one package more readily available through distribution than another? (One of my favorite websites for checking part availability across various electronic component distributors is Octopart.com.)

  • How does the unit price compare between the different package options?

  • In today’s tumultuous procurement space, a part that’s widely available today may be out of stock tomorrow. Does an alternate manufacturer offer a compatible part in the package you are considering? Always be prepared for the unanticipated fire.

• Manufacturing considerations

  • Often, the smallest package is a newer technology with uniquely shaped pads which are very close together. This may present soldering challenges for the CM who is assembling your boards, resulting in unexpected shorts underneath the part.

  • Will assemblers need to touch-up the part after it’s placed and soldered by machine?

    • A leaded part can be reworked or installed from the bench, but a BGA (ball grid array) is best installed by a pick-and-place machine. Similarly, hand soldering a part with a center pad may present difficulties if you don’t have the right tools for the job.

    • A smaller part may allow more space for a hand solder gun, while a larger part may result in the solder gun damaging nearby components. (Watch out, ceramic caps!)

  • If working with a polarized part, does the package have a keying pin that ensures it can only be installed at one orientation angle? Or can the part be unintentionally rotated, while still being properly soldered to the PCB? Diodes are often available in two pin packages, which can result in backwards installation if care is not taken to communicate proper orientation to the CM. However, diodes in SOT23-3 packages have a third pin, ensuring that the part can only be installed in the proper orientation.

  • The cost of a part that cannot be reworked is not limited to the single part. You’ve also lost the PCB, all other parts soldered to the PCB, and the time spent building it on the line.

• Marketing considerations

  • Is the final product photogenic? Does it look like it was designed in the 1980’s, or does it utilize modern technologies?

When selecting the IPC package for a surface-mount component, the smallest package is not always the best choice for a design. Often, a deeper understanding of an organization can lead to a part package that is more optimal.

Our staff at the Engineering Design Group has a history of working closely with the different teams across an organization. But we understand that every company is unique. Whether you seek to shave a few seconds off your product cycle time, reduce BOM cost to increase profit margins, or to show your customers that you are on the leading edge of an industry — We are here to help.

Avoid Feature Creep: Write a Spec

Give me a pencil and paper, and let me sketch out this great idea. Scratch that — give me a laptop with a decent CAD tool — I’m ready to dive in. Here’s a PCB outline. It’ll need a power input connector, and a few USB ports too. An LED would be nice. Maybe an SSD for some onboard storage. Better add two mounting holes for a heatsink while we’re at it. And an Ethernet PHY, because — IoT! Shoot, we should have placed a cutout at the right edge to allow for cabling inside the enclosure. We can make room by removing half of the USB ports…

When designing hardware (and software), it’s tempting to dive into a project without sufficient planning. The designer in all of us likes the gratification that comes with engineering our next big idea. The closer we get to finishing the design, the closer it is to being in our hands, and the closer we are to applying power to it, debugging it, and sharing it with the world. Simple, right?

Wrong.

The problem with this method, is that without a plan, our ideas — and the entire scope of the project — will evolve while we are designing.

How much time is lost on an individual project when the scope changes? Did removing an extra USB port at the last minute result in a larger-than-necessary USB hub on the board, with more parts, more weight, higher cost and power consumption, and more points of failure? Were parts purchased that will now sit on the shelf because they will no longer be used on the design?

Parts aside — Was the reduction of a power supply overlooked with the last minute part removal, resulting in worse efficiency? Did a last minute change result in a careless connection error and another PCB spin? Is your customer disappointed to hear that the product won’t be available for two more months?

Take a deep breath.

Feature creep on a project is something we have all experienced. But it is something we can avoid by spending more time thinking through the form, fit, and function of our products before we design them. This is best accomplished with a design specification, a formal document that describes the “what”, “how”, and “where” of the design. What is the functionality of the product? How will the circuits be designed to achieve the desired functionality? And where will key components reside that are connecting to other pieces in the larger puzzle?

In essence, the specification is the map a team agrees to follow when the engineers begin their work. That’s why at the Engineering Design Group, specifications are the cornerstone for each of our projects. If you have a great idea, let’s work together to translate it into a specification. Because, with a map in hand, our team can engineer your next idea idea, and you can share your product with the world.

What are you waiting for?

Design vs. Production Trade-offs through the Lens of Modularity

Engineers promote modularity and code reuse when developing software, writing FPGA code, and designing hardware. Even modern EDA software packages take advantage of reusable modules at the schematic capture and PCB layout stages. Often, functional reuse is encouraged to reduce the design phase of a product and achieve faster time-to-market.

But the world of engineering is not limited to design. Design teams must also consider procurement and operations. Modularity can be crucial well after the product is designed and fielded to customers. This is not without its tradeoffs.

If a system contains two customized circuit boards which each have a component that requires passive heat dissipation, it would behoove the designer to take the extra steps to ensure both boards share the same heatsink mounting footprint. However, while a modular thermal solution with repeated use on the second PCB benefits the designer with reductions in design time and file management, the procurement team may also see a benefit: Purchasing a higher quantity of a single unit will increase the likelihood of a price break, thereby increasing profit margins of the system for the corporation.

Like all decisions, this comes at a cost which could be observed both in production and engineering.

After units are fielded, should a customer discover a flaw in the mounting threads for the heatsink, then all heatsinks must be remachined, stalling the production lines for both circuit boards. Whereas, if each circuit board were designed with a unique heatsink tailored to fit, a fault in one design would be less likely to impact the other, and the line assembling the circuit boards without the faulty part may resume.

The modular heatsinks in our dual-circuit board system could also come at the cost of reduced functionality to the customer.

Back at the design house, the engineering team may have elected to use the same heatsink to cool chips of two different manufacturers, each with different heights. The heatsink is designed optimally for the taller of the two parts, where the part makes direct contact with the heatsink using a low resistivity thermal compound. To accommodate the shorter part, a thermal gap pad is utilized, which has a higher thermal resistivity, resulting in reduced performance of the part.

At the Engineering Design Group, we work closely with our customers to understand their design goals. Whether they seek a short design cycle, optimum heat transfer, or factory operating efficiencies, our team will be paying attention to the design trade-offs throughout the design process as we work with you towards the solution.