Encapsulating the advantages of the small EMS
12 April 2010
Does the perfect EMS partner do what it is told, or does it play a more proactive role in product development?
This topic came to the fore as I received word from a small UK-based contract manufacturer that it had developed an encapsulation process that could help protect circuits both from the environment and intellectual property theft and provide a novel way of marking products. The company, Wilson Process Systems (WPS), confess the process is not high tech and the benefits of encapsulation for some circuits are well known.
However, what WPS does highlight is that by being able to deliver a low-cost and flexible process they can provide a wider portfolio of services that can be fed back to their customers. The nature of the process is largely irrelevant, I just took this encapsulation process as an example because it was current, but this particular service is quite quirky, in that encapsulation is typically used purely for circuit protection. WPS say that OEMs can also consider it for IP protection, as an encapsulated circuit is far more difficult to reverse engineer, and it can also be adapted to provide a permanent product or company name without using expensive moulds.
The important consideration in this context is that the EMS provider can start to offer improvements to their clients’ products that had not previously been considered. There seems to be a divergence within the EMS industry to what extent this is a good idea. At the high volume end such add-on processes are disproportionately expensive and not generally encouraged by the EMS providers, although I am sure if asked they would happily oblige. At the other end of the scale, and WPS is typical of this in the UK/Western European electronics industry, where prototyping and low to mid volume manufacturing is the norm, the EMS providers are often required to be far more flexible, and whether you want a cable harness or a cleanroom there is more chance of finding it in this environment. It is when these EMS companies start feeding back previously unconsidered ideas that the OEMs benefit from, that the smaller, more agile EMS providers come into their own.
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