TAD electronics

02/09/2026

24 component-data issues. One PCB design. That's what was uncovered during the pre-build inspection in one PCB assembly case study.

The findings included three footprint mismatches, five missing orientation or pin markings, two missing manufacturer part numbers, eight missing datasheets, five unavailable parts and one obsolete component.

None of those problems originated on the assembly line. They were already sitting in the information supplied to manufacturing.

That's why a BOM shouldn't be checked in isolation. Part numbers, datasheets, footprints, placement data and assembly information all need to describe the same physical product.

The earlier those discrepancies are found, the easier they are to fix.,Once purchasing and assembly begin, every small mistake has an opportunity to multiply.

01/09/2026

A good electronics design shouldn't leave manufacturing with questions.

Which exact component should we buy?
Does it actually fit the footprint?
Which way round does it go?
Is this the latest BOM?

At TAD, our risk-free electronic design service considers how a product will actually be built, not just whether the circuit works.

That means thinking about component selection, manufacturing data, testing and production from the beginning.

Because a design isn't finished if somebody still has to work out how to build it.

28/08/2026

64% of electronics manufacturers are currently dealing with limited component availability or extended lead times.

So a component being available for your prototype doesn't necessarily mean your supply chain is ready for production.

A pilot build is an opportunity to test that assumption before volumes increase - including whether components can be sourced at the quantities required and whether approved alternatives actually behave as expected.

Production-ready means the supply chain has to work too.

27/08/2026

Sometimes the value of working with one electronics partner is what happens after the original design work.

Our work with Hi-Force has included electronic design alongside ongoing manufacturing and support.

That continuity matters. The knowledge developed during engineering doesn't disappear at handover - it can carry through into how the electronics are built, tested and supported over their lifetime.

It's why we see manufacturing as part of product development, rather than simply what happens afterwards.

26/08/2026

250 seconds on paper. Nearly 900 seconds in reality.

That's what NIST found when comparing the simulated and real manufacturing time for an aerospace power-electronics heat sink.

One feature alone was expected to take around 15 seconds but actually took 80 because the operator needed to slow the process to achieve the required quality.

It is a great example of something we see throughout manufacturing:

Being able to make something isn't the same as being able to make it efficiently.

Pilot builds put the design in front of real operators, tooling, test equipment and production constraints. That's when the little things appear - awkward assembly, inaccessible test points, extra handling, rework or processes that take far longer than expected.

Finding those issues across a pilot run gives you a chance to fix them.

Finding them across 1,000 units gives you a production problem.

21/08/2026

72% less cycle time.
800 > 4,500 units per week.
The same 98.8% quality rate.

Those were the results reported in a 2026 study of an automotive inertial sensor calibration line after its workstation and calibration process were redesigned.

The interesting part is that calibration wasn't removed. The process around it got better.

Fixtures were redesigned, handling was improved and complete sets of sensors could be moved together. The process went from requiring two operators to one, while weekly output increased more than fivefold.

It's a useful reminder that manufacturing capacity isn't always increased by buying more equipment or adding more people.

Sometimes you need to look closely at the small, repeatable processes that are quietly consuming all the time.

Good electronics design considers how the product will be manufactured before manufacturing starts.

20/08/2026

Getting electronics into production is about much more than handing over a finished PCB design.

We've seen that across projects such as Hi-Force, where TAD's involvement has extended beyond the electronics themselves into creating a solution that can be manufactured and supported as a complete product.

That's an important distinction.

When we design electronics, we're already thinking about what happens afterwards. How will it be assembled? How will it be programmed? How will it be tested? How do we make production repeatable? And if something goes wrong several years from now, will there be enough information to understand what happened?

Because the customer doesn't ultimately need a clever PCB.

They need a product they can keep building.

That's where having electronic design, prototyping, manufacturing and lifetime support under one roof can make a very practical difference.

19/08/2026

Five minutes does not sound like a particularly long production step.

Until you have to do it 1,000 times.

Calibration is one of those processes that can seem perfectly manageable during prototyping, only to become a serious bottleneck when production volumes increase.

And often, the calibration itself isn't really the problem. It's everything around it.

Awkward test access. Manual adjustments. Repeated connections. Long settling times. Specialist equipment. Processes that depend too heavily on individual judgement.

Our latest blog looks at how calibration steps can slow electronics manufacturing when they aren't considered early enough, and how hardware, firmware and test fixture design can make calibration much easier to repeat at scale.

Read the full blog here - https://tad-electronics.co.uk/news/electronics-calibration-manufacturing-delays/

Learn how electronics calibration in manufacturing affects production time, repeatability, test fixtures and long-term product consistency.

13/08/2026

Vehicle electronics don't get the luxury of perfect power. That's something we've had to design around on real customer projects.

When Oshkosh AeroTech needed electronics to control critical functions on its ATLAS aircraft loader, reliability wasn't simply about choosing a good PCB or writing good firmware.

The electronics had to work as part of a real vehicle, communicating with other systems and safely controlling functions including braking and engine behaviour.

That's where our Electronic Design and Software/Firmware Design services come together.

Power behaviour, CAN communications, control logic, hardware and firmware aren't treated as separate problems handed between different suppliers. We can consider how the complete system behaves from the beginning.

Because when electronics are responsible for controlling real equipment, "it worked on the bench" isn't much of a success criterion.

12/08/2026

A cellular module might be small enough to sit comfortably on a PCB.

That doesn't mean its demands on the rest of the system are small.

Quectel specifies a power supply capable of providing up to 3A for one of its LTE modules. It also recommends allowing that supply to stabilise for at least 30 milliseconds before beginning the module's start-up sequence. That's an important detail.

You can calculate an embedded product's average power consumption and conclude everything looks comfortable. Then the radio wakes up, demands a sudden burst of current and pulls the supply down far enough to reset the processor. Suddenly you have an intermittent fault that looks completely unrelated to the radio.

This is why good power design isn't just about how much power a product needs. It's also about when it needs it.