This post covers PCB design engineering rates, costs and freelance service prices for developing new products. Printed circuit boards (PCBs) are crucial in a wide range of products, providing the necessary interconnections between components. These versatile boards are utilized in various applications, spanning from underground sensors and car engines to DVD players and computers. Originally developed for military purposes during World War II, PCBs have become an integral part of modern technology. With the advancement of electrical circuit design services, the design and development of PCBs have become even more sophisticated, enabling their widespread use in almost every industry and product today.
This means when designing a new product, chances are good that, at some point, you’ll need to hire a PCB designer and electrical engineer to help you create a functional PCB board that works for your product. If you need to hire a PCB design engineer, it’s essential to figure out the rates so that you can factor this into the overall cost of your product. This article is designed to break down the cost of design rates and other costs and fees that could occur.
Table of Contents
What you’ll need
While you can get a rough estimate on pricing, to get an official quote, you will need enough details for the PCB design engineer to provide a closer estimate. Without this information, the cost could likely fluctuate wildly, and you may find that the PCB costs a lot more than you thought. Certain documents are needed to help with the quote. There are also additional documents that can provide that while not necessarily needed, will help in providing a proper estimate. Let’s go over these documents now.
Schematic
One of the required documents you will need is a schematic of the PCB. This should be provided as a Native design file or PDF. A schematic tells the freelance engineering design service a lot about the product, including how much work it will take to do the design, and a rough idea of how many hours that will be. It also gives them an idea of technical difficulty, and what you are trying to accomplish with your product.
BOM (bill of materials)
Next on the list of required documents is a BOM. The bill of materials contains a complete list of materials and parts used to create the PCB. You can think of this as a shopping list for all the ingredients needed to make the product.
A BOM will tell the PCB designer what sort of materials will be going into the product, and what they’ll be using in the design.
Mechanical (DXF, IDF, PDF, or simple X-Y dimensions)
The final piece of information needed is the mechanical information. This focuses on the PCB’s dimensions and the board’s outline. PCB design requires a lot of detail, because not only does it have to perform the actions needed for the product to work, but it must also fit perfectly in the product.
These files are needed at the minimum to create a functional product, but you can make it easier with even more details. Optional files that help include things like the netfiles, routing/constraint rules, a placement floorplan, and component datasheets.
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With this information, printed circuit board design professionals will have a clear idea of what your product looks like and should be able to give a very close quote as to how much the product costs. If you don’t have this information, you may need to hire someone earlier in the project to get the files needed for the design.
PCBs are complex pieces, and many hands will touch the project before completion. If you don’t have the right information and hope the PCB engineer can fill in the blanks, it may cost you more. It’s better to pay someone with a lower hourly fee to get the documents you need rather than adding extra expenses to an engineer to do the work—if they will.
Other things you should discuss
While the documents are the minimum needed to get a quote, other information helps narrow your quote to a specific price range. This information will also help reduce the number of mistakes, which can sometimes be costly, and aid in communication. Your electrical engineer may want to know whether or not you have an internal component library, your target completion date, and how much you hope the PCB will cost to manufacture.
This information can help them tailor the design to your company’s needs or may impact the price in other ways. If you have any questions related to the creation process, this is also a good time to ask them. By bringing up your concerns, you can set up communication early and avoid mistakes as much as possible.
Estimating hours of work
Most PCB engineering designers charge by the hour, and the quote estimates the hours it will take to complete your design. Design completion usually includes the following things:
- Library component creation
- Critical placement
- Placement
- Critical routing
- Routing
- Output file generation
If you already have your own library, this may reduce the time needed. On the other hand, if the area for pin placement is very small, it could take more time than usual to figure out how to place them so that the PCB still works. That’s why it’s not as simple as throwing the size of a PCB into a calculator and multiplying the hourly fee by the hour. However, you can still get a general idea by starting with the base price and adjusting for ‘add-ons.’ Here are a few examples of add-ons to give you an idea of what may affect your pricing:
Component pin density
As we mentioned earlier, how close the pins are matters. The smaller the space, the harder it is to place them. If the pins are over a specific amount, 400 pins per square inch, it will cost more than the base price because it is much more time-intensive.
Routing density
In the same way too many pins can cause the pricing to go up, if many routes are needed for the product, this may also cost more. This is a bit more complicated than just numbers, with the number of nets and the shape of the PCB also being important factors.
Routing topology
It’s not just the number of routes or the shape of the PCB that can affect pricing. The routing topology and other things like routing timing also come into play. DDR memory schemes are one example of a more advanced technology that can slow down the engineer.
HDI
HDI can also have a big impact on the PCB and how long it takes to create it. HDI is very useful because it allows you to make the board smaller and make a difference in the PCB itself, but it comes at a price.
Military or aerospace designs
Finally, military and aerospace designs typically take much more time to build. Although these designs are often similar to regular PCBs, these fields usually have much more stringent design requirements. Because the specifications are much more strict for these industries, you can expect a higher price.
Hours needed for a printed circuit board (PCB)
Using the information above, you probably know whether your PCB board will be on the lower end of the spectrum or the higher end. Nailing down a more specific price involves figuring out how many hours your PCB board will take to complete. Calculators exist to help you estimate costs, but in the end, you’ll need a quote to help you. They can take as few as 5-6 hours for a single connector PCB board, all the way up to 360+ hours for a complicated board that needs to fit into the product and has a lot of layers.
Other factors can increase or decrease the time needed. If the initial information for the PCB board is already very clear, or you already have a library of components available, this may reduce the hours needed. If you let the engineer handle the confusing areas of the project, expect more hours.
The best way to determine how many hours your project will need is to get quotes on them from freelance civil engineers. While some may lowball the hours needed, if most of your quotes come back in a similar hourly range, you can guess how many hours are the average for your board. Once you know the hours, you can multiply that by the rate of your engineer and get a rough idea of the cost of your project.
How much does a PCB design professional cost?
When a PCB design professional gets back to you with a quote, it will be with how many hours each part of the design will cost multiplied by their hourly price. If they quote 60 hours for a PCB board and their price is $150 per hour, then you can expect the board to cost around $8,700 to design. It’s important to remember that no matter how good an engineer is, they may be unable to quote a price down to the exact hour. Things may go more smoothly, but they could also run into problems and take longer. It’s best to assume it may be a little bit more than the quoted price to have the funds planned for should it occur.
The rates for an engineer will vary from person to person, so looking at the normal range of rates for a PCB engineer is a logical next step to estimating the cost of designing a product. Engineering design services require a lot of education and training in the field and usually command a higher salary. The average salary for a PCB designer is $86,437. Most engineers specializing in PCB design charge between $95 and $145 an hour. Almost all of them charge an hourly fee over flat fees or percentages.
This is important because if you get a quote that seems low, it probably is, and the cost will be made up with additional time added later. Understanding how complex your PCB board is can help you figure out whether or not a quote is a good deal or too good to be true.
Why do PCB design engineering fees vary
A wage difference of $95-$145 is already a large variance, and that’s only the average! Some PCB design engineers charge as much as $300 an hour. There are a few reasons why rates fluctuate, and understanding why can help you select the best PCB design engineer. Rates fluctuate most often based on education and experience. An engineer who is fresh out of university and has little to no experience in the field will likely charge on the lower end of the scale. This more modest pay is reflective of their lack of experience.
As engineers gain more experience and their PCB board designs improve, their prices climb. PCB engineers on the higher end of the pay scale usually get there because they have enough customers to keep them busy, and people come back because the designs are worth the price. This isn’t true in every case. You may get a stellar deal on a talented individual with low price who is simply trying to get their foot in the door—or pay a high price for someone who isn’t that great.
This is why due diligence is so important when hiring an engineer. The best way to ensure you get a high-quality engineer is to check reviews, follow up on referrals, and ask questions. The more you know about an engineer, the better your chances are of choosing someone right for you. It’s also best to look at more than one engineer and not simply hire the first PCB engineering designer who comes your way. Checking multiple engineers can help you find someone who meshes well with your company culture, has the talent you need, and whose price reflects their quality of work.
Why you need an electronic PCB prototype
Even a simple PCB board can be deceptively hard to get right. You may think that because your PCB board isn’t very complex, it will be easy for a manufacturer to understand and build. The problem is it is very common for mistakes to sneak through the process on simple boards. Imagine paying for 30,000 PCB boards only to discover they don’t work as planned. You now have 30,000 PCB boards you can’t use or must fix. A single PCB prototype, facilitated by freelance electronic prototyping and design services, can avoid this mistake by letting you iron out any problems before it gets to the production stage.
Why you need to hire a PCB engineer
At first glance, a CAD designer and PCB engineer do similar work. They’re both showing the PCB layout and how it works and are building it differently. It may be tempting to skip the PCB engineer and use a CAD designer to complete your project. PCB engineers have significant value that can save you money in the long run. They often have experience not just in how PCBs work but also in manufacturing.
Suppose your PCB is made in a way that isn’t easily manufacturable. In that case, you may have to pay a fortune to the manufacturer for new dyes or other changes to the facility to do your project. Long term, it’s cheaper to design a product that is manufacturable from the get-go. Even assuming the CAD designer can create a PCB board that works for the purpose, with the aid of electrical schematic drawing services, they may not know what makes the PCB easily manufactured. A few simple changes to the board could make manufacturing much cheaper, saving money over time, with a more experienced PCB designer.
Even relatively benign features can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars down the road if it isn’t easy to manufacture. This can be something as simple as a button in an unusual place or anything requiring you to purchase an injection mold to create it. When your engineer is looking at your prototype, they may be able to make suggestions that don’t harm the quality of the product at all but reduce the manufacturing costs by massive amounts.
This isn’t a guarantee, depending on the prototype, but it is a possibility. Engineering is a skilled profession, and there’s a good reason why so many companies use prototype design engineering services to design their prototypes. Their skill and experience can help bring costs down overall.
Conclusion
Rates for PCB boards are highly variable. While the design may seem as simple as gauging how many hours are needed and multiplying that by the hours worked by the engineer, these hours can significantly fluctuate depending on the individual board. While you can get a rough estimate yourself through calculators based on the estimated hours needed, the complexity of the board, and the price of the PCB engineer, you’ll need to get direct quotes to nail down the pricing of your specific piece.
Cad Crowd can provide a free quote for your company’s PCB design requirements. Get one today.
