Half Staff

摘要

Rapid prototyping and first-article inspection are technologies that have been around for years, but should gain significant momentum in the coming months as companies look to cut the cost of new products. It can't happen soon enough: Years ago then-Flextronics CTO Nic Braithwaite told me he calculated a large, multi-board server program could conceivably cost $50 million to ramp, once all the ECOs and respins were accounted for. Granted, upfront spending of that degree would be the exception, not the rule, but in the past year or so we've known of programs where multiple iterations of the same end-product are in development simultaneously, all as the OEMs race to get important high-volume consumer electronics to market.